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I
1^,1 Jll3?.^Jl ,4'
HARVARD COLLEGE*
LIBRARY
FRd^ mB FUND- OF,
CHARLES MINOT
CLASS OF 1^8
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paaeS J/3 —e/jd rrf/sf u,'<:^
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a
"6rcat Mritere/'
EDITED BT
PROFESSOR ERIC S. ROBERTSON, M.A.
LIFE OF MILL.
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I
o
LIFE
OF
JOHN STUART MILL
W. L. COURTNEY
LONDON
WALTER SCOTT, 24 WARWICK LANE
NEW YORK : THOMAS WHITTAKER
TORONTO : W. J. GAGE AND CO.
1889
(A /I rights reserved^
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^^^■•^$^-^^.
Q
<r'
JAN 19 188!)
RWnL JUL 18 1911
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CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
Character of James Mill^ different estimates by friends and
foes ; external events of James Mill's life ; inner life ; his
friends ; unamiability in domestic life ; intellectual work ;
chief characteristic of James Mill a certain hardness of
fibre ; the ^ighteenth-century spirit ; James Mill's logical
precision and analytic ingenuity equally unfortunate ; cold
rationalism and its effects ; important influence of James
Millj both in the political and in the intellectual world . 1 1
CHAPTER n.
A disquisitive youth ; early education given by his fether to
J. S. Mill ; Greek, Latin, and mathematics ; estimate of
the value of this early education ; unsympathetic character
of the father 5 effects on Mill's demeanour; foreign visit to
the family of Sir Samuel Bentham ; incidents of the vbit ;
interest taken in the French nation ; return to England
and commencement of public life as a clerk in India
House 29
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6 CONTENTS,
CHAPTER III.
PAGK
Importance of the fifteen years which succeeded Mill's entry
into publiclife ; sketch of Mill's position at the outset of
his career; Deitiocrat, Empiricist, Benthamite, Utilitarian ;
Utilitarian Society and Speculative Debating Society ;
youthful intolerance of Mill and his friends ; crisis in
mental history, its causes and its nature ; friendship with
Maurice and Sterling ; reality of the change which had
come over Mill; article on Bentham, and depreciatory
estimate of his character ; appreciation of Wordsworth's
poetry ; article on Coleridge ; change in views of the
method of political study ; advocacy of Female Suffrage . 48
CHAPTER IV.
Illness ; preparation for Lo^c ; Mill at Falmouth with the Fox
family ; description of Mill by Dr. Bain ; Mill as
described by Caroline Fox ; death of Henry Mill ; Mill as
a botanist ; publication of Mill's Logic ; its reception and
its general character ; outline of its contents ; value, as a
handbook of scientific method ; criticism of Mill's
position ; his theory of inference ; treatment of the belief
in natural uniformity ; of geometrical axioms ; of cause
and effect 5 of the science of sociology, as dependent on
a science of character* 69
CHAPTER V.
Literary work intervening between the LogU and the Political
Economy ; friendship and rnrrf spnndpnftft wjlh- AllC^i'^tf
ConUe^; Political Economy published in 1848 ; Mill's
Essays on Unsettled Questions in Political Economy ; brief
sketch of development of economic doctrine ; the
mercantile system ; the physiocrats ; Adam Smith ;
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CONTENTS. 7
PAGE
Ricardo ; defects of Ricardo ; development of the
principles of Ricardo and Malthus in Mill ; other
influences acting on Mill ; criticism of Mill's views ;
relation of political economy to sociology ; method of
the science ; tendencies to socialism ; importance of the
moral element in future economic study. • • • . 90
CHAPTER VI.
Temporary failure of energy after 1848 ; illness ; petition to
Parliament on behalf of East India Company ; introduction
to Mrs. Taylor and its results; exaggerated language of
Mill ; different verdicts on Mrs. Taylor ; marriage with
Mill, and death ; attempted explanation of Mill's estimate
of his wife's genius ; actual contributions on her part to his
works ; grief of Mill at her death no
CHAPTER VII.
Second harvest of intellectual toil ; Mill's Liberty ; its perma-
nent and its relative value ; presuppositions under which
the book is written ; Thoughts on Parlianieniary Reform
and Representative Government published ; Utilitarianism,
Mill's ethical treatise ; difference in character of Mill's
utilitarian views and Bentham's ; criticism of the book ;
Examination of Sir IVit/iam Hamilton published^ its
general character; dislike of Mansel's views; Mill at
^Axjgnon • • 123
CHAPTER VIII.
Plato on philosophers; Mr. Gladstone's judgment of Milla&A.
politicifin^; " saint of rationalism ; " history of candidature
aTWestminstert and election to parliament ; Mill's first
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8 (CONTENTS.
PAGE
session (1866), and his early speeches; the attempted pro*
secutioi) of Goveirnor Eyre ; Mill's attitude on the question
of the Jamaica insurrection ; charge of Chief-Justice
Cockbum; attempted Reform meeting at Hyde Park;
destruction of railings ; Mill dissuades the Reformers from
9 secqpd meeting ; session of 1867 ; the right of women to
vote ; Miirs views on the Irish question ; pamphlet on
Eiigland and Ireland ; Mill at St. James's Hall ; other
speeches of Mill ; election of 1868 ; defeat of Mill at West-
minster ; reasons for defeat ; Mill in the House ; ^iU as
an orator 140
CHAPTER IX.
Mill's work during recess; address to thfi--students at St.
Andrews ; Mill's edition of the Analysis of the Humaii
Mind published ; Subjection of Women published ; the
argument of the book ; Mill i n his cottage-life at
Avjgnnn^ he attends Grote's funeral ; dies May 8th7
1873; the Autobiography and the Essays on Religion
\/ published after his death ; the first essay on Nature ;
the second essay on T!ke Utility of Religion ; the third
Assay on TTuism ; importance of the third essay;
'Nummary of chief jjpints in Mill's cbaraclfir ; his receptivity
of diverse influences ; destructive and constructive side ;
his disinterestedness, courage, and zeal for mankind ; a
visit of Mill to Mr. John Morley 160
INDEX 179
APPENDIX (I.) 189
„ • (11.) 191
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
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NOTE.
IT is needless to say that the following pages are
largely indebted to J. S. Mill's Autobiography^ and
to Dr. Bain's two works, James Mill: a Biography^
and J. S. Mill: a Criticism, Besides these, I have
found much that was valuable for my purpose in
Caroline Fox's Journals and Letters ; Professor Minto's
article in the Encyclopedia Britannica ; and occasional
articles by Mr. Morley in the Fortnightly Review, I
ought also especially to acknowledge the courtesy of
the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, who was good enough
to write a letter to me on Mill's career in Parliament.
To friends who have helped me here and there in the
following pages by kindly criticism, I need not offer any
public recognition of my gratitude.
Oxford, November 1888.
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John Stuart Mill
CHAPTER I.
THE FATHER.
THERE are many points of similarity, as well as of
contrast, between the two Mills — father and son
— ^both in character, circumstances, and life. But
while in the one case the parentage is an important
element, in the other it has, apparently, no appreciable
influence. Without James Mill the career of John
Stuart Mill is almost inexplicable ; but though we know
thit the father of James Mill was a shoemaker, and that
his mother, Isabella Fenton, was a farmer's daughter,
it is doubtful whether any stress can be laid on such
historical data. There is, as yet, no science of the
genesis of greatness. Which of the two men was the
more original, and whether both were not men rather of
talent than genius, may be considered open questions.
James Mill, at all events, was the more consistent
thinker. One of the first features in the self-education
of John Stuart Mill was the commencement of a revolt
against some of the sterner mental discipline which he
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J
12 LIFE OF
had imbibed from the teaching and practice of the
historian of British India.
It is not easy to rescue the character of James Mill
from the depreciation of his enemies, or the laudations
of his friends. The more favourable estimate can be
perused in the preface which his son wrote to the new
edition of the Analysis of the Human Mind, "When
the literary and philosophical history of this century
comes to be written as it deserves to be, very few are the
names figuring in it to whom as high a place. will be
awarded as to James Mill. In the vigour and penetra-
tion of his intellect he has had few superiors in the
history of thought : in the wide compass of the human
J interests which he cared for and served, he was almost
equally remarkable : and the energy and determination of
^ his character, giving effect to as single-minded an ardour
for the improvement of mankind and of human life as I
believe has ever existed, make his life a memorable
example. All his work as a thinker was devoted to the
\) service of mankind, either by the direct improvement of
their beliefs and sentiments, or by warring against the
various influences which he regarded as obstacles to their
progress; and while he put as much conscientious
thought and labour into everything he did, as if he had
never done anything else, the subjects on which he
wrote took as wide a range as if he had written without
any labour at all."* Here, at least, is ungrudging praise ;
but the censure, if not equally precise, is, at all events,
equally unsparing. "We have been for some time
inclined to suspect," says Macaulay in his essay on
Mill's article on Government^ "that these people [the
* Mill's Analysis, New Edition (1869). Preface, p. xiii.
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JOHN STUART MILL. 13
Utilitarians], whom some regard as the lights of the
world, and others as incarnate demons, are, in general,
ordinary men, with narrow understandings and little
information. The contempt which they express for
elegant literature is evidently the contempt of ignorance.
We apprehend that many of them are persons who,
having read little or nothing, are delighted to be rescued
from the sense of their own inferiority by some teacher,
who assures them that the studies which they have
neglected are of no value, puts five or six phrases into
their mouths, lends them an odd number of the West-
minster Review^ and in a month transforms them into
philosophers. Mingled with these smatterers, whose
attainments just suffice to elevate them from the insig-
nificance of dunces to the dignity of bores, and to spread
dismay among their pious aunts and grandmothers,
there are, we well know, many well-meaning men, who
have really read and thought much, but whose reading
and meditation have been almost exclusively confined to
one class of subjects, and who, consequently, though
they possess much valuable knowledge respecting those
subjects, are by no means so well qualified to judge of a
great system as if they had taken a more enlarged view
of literature and society."* It is difficult to realise
that these are two delineations of the same person.
Macaulay, of course, held a brief in this matter, and
therefore, if we were compelled to choose between the
two verdicts, we should have to accept the less rhetorical
estimate; yet much must be said on the other side,
M only to explain the fact that Macaulay's article was
one among the other criticisms which induced John
* Edinburgh Review* No. 97. March, 1829,
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14 LIFE OF
Stuart Mill to reconsider and transform the political
speculations of his father.
The external events of James Mill's life can be readily
summarised. Bom in 1773, at Northwater Bridge, in
the parish of Logic Pert, county of Forfar or Angus', he
was first educated in Montrose Academy, and formed a
valuable and life-long acquaintance with Sir John Stuart,
of Fettercaim, who eventually gave a name to his eldest
son, John Stuart Mill In 1790 he went to the University
of Edinburgh, at the age of seventeen and a half years,
and eight years afterwards was licensed as a preacher. It
was in 1802 that he, as is not unusual with Scotchmen,
turned his back on his native country, and, in the com-
pany of Sir John Stuart, entered London. His London
life may be divided into three periods. The period of
struggle lasts from 1802 to 1819, when he gained an
appointment at the India House. From 1819 to 1829
is the time of his greatest and most successful literary
activity, the culmination of his career having been
reached in 1830. From that time to his death, in 1836,
is the period of comparative affluence, when he was not
only enjoying the fame of his intellectual work, but had
also been made Head Examiner in the India House.
But the same period is also one of decreasing energy,
due to the gradual decay of his physical powers ; and
his death, at the early age of sixty-three, was in large
measure caused by the increasing demands which a life
of laborious industry had made on his constitution.
M The inner life is more important, and requires a longer
notice. We have seen that he was originally trained for
the ministry, and that he was actually licensed as a
preacher. It is not quite clear when he first adopted
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JOHN STUART MILL, 15
the negativist attitude towards religion which he im-
parted to his son ; but the change seems to have been
due to, some of the friendships which he formed at an
early period of his life in London, especially the friend-
ship with the South American patriot, General Miranda.*
His chief friends from i8io onwards were Jeremy
Bentham, Ricardo, Brougham, George Grote, Joseph
Hume, William Allen, the Quaker and philanthropist,
and the radical tailor of Charing Cross, Francis Place.
With all of these he worked in common ; most of all,
perhaps, with Bentham. With Bentham he lived in
closest intimacy: he stayed with him both at Barrow
Green and at Ford Abbey, and consoled himself in 181 2
with the reflection that if he died, his son would be left
in Bentham's hands. Doubtless he gained from, as well
as imparted to, Bentham's circle of intimate friends
many of those ruling conceptions, both in morals and in
practical life, which were held by the so-called Utilitarian
school ; and freedom of thought on religious subjects
would, of course, be included in the intellectual pro-
gramme. Yet there were discords even in the generally
harmonious relationship with Bentham. We know that
on one occasion Mill had to write a dignified letter to
Bentham, suggesting that it would be better for both
parties if they saw each other less frequently; and though
the breach was temporarily closed, Bentham appears to
have made remarks about his friend in private conversa-
tions which, if *hey were not actually inaccurate, were
certainly ill-natured. He made, for instance, the charge
against MilPs political opinions that they resulted less
* So Mill himself told an intimate friend, Walter Coulson. Cf.
"BaiViS James Mill^ p. 89.
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i6 LIFE OF
v^from love for the many than from hatred of the few — ^an
opinion which John Stuart Mill indignantly repudiated
on behalf of his father. Another criticism on his social
demeanour is curious. " He will never," says Bentham,
"willingly enter into discourse with me. \Vhen he
differs, he is silent He is a character. He expects to
subdue everybody by his domineering tone, to convince
everybody by his positiveness. His manner of speaking
is oppressive and overbearing. He comes to me as if
he wore a mask on his face."* Some of this criticism
is transparently false, for on all sides it was allowed
that Mill was a brilliant conversationalist. But Lord
Brougham, in the introduction to his speech on Law
Reform (February 7, 1828), in the midst of a general
eulogy on his friend, remarks that " he had something of
the dogmatism of his school ; " and the * mask on his
face' receives a pathetic illustration in the comments
V which his son afterwards made on his diligent conceal-
ment of a real warmth of feeling towards his children.
There can be no doubt that there was a certain asperity
of manner in his ordinary demeanour, and it served to
mar much of the domestic happiness of his family. In
^ 1805 he married Harriet Burrow, a girl of unusual
beauty, from whom John Stuart derived his aquiline
type of face; but, according to Dr. Bain, the union was
never happy, and there was disappointment on both
sides. A glimpse of the domestic life at Queen's
Square, in 1830, when there was a family of nine, the
eldest twenty-four and the youngest six years of age, fails
to give a pleasing impression. After John, we are told,
* Quoted from Bowring*8 Life of Bentham^ by Bain : James
Millf Appendix, 463.
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w
JOHN STUART MILL. 17
the next elder children seem to have disappointed their ^...---
father, and he never looked upon them with com-
placency. The son speaks of his father as " the most v
impatient of men," and it is clear that though he could
exercise perfect self-control in his intercourse with
the world, he did not care to restrain the irritability
of his temper at home. The following sentences
from Dr. Bain's biography need no comment. "In
his advancing years, as often happens, he courted
the affection of the younger children, but their
love to him was never wholly unmingled with fear,
for, even in his most amiable moods, he was not
to be trifled with. His entering the room where
the family was assembled was observed by strangers
to operate as an immediate damper. . This was not y
the worst. The one really disagreeable trait in Mill's^
character, and the thing that has left the most painful
memories, was the way that he allowed himself to speak
and behave to his wife and children before visitors.
When we read his letters to friends, we see him acting
the family man with the utmost propriety, putting
forward his wife and children into their due place;
but he seemed unable to observe this part in daily
intercourse."*
"^It is pleasant to turn from this side of his character to
his intellectual work. His great work, carried out in the
. midst of pecuniary difficulties and manifold interruptions, ^/
was the History of India, which was published in 181 7,
and seems to have secured for him a post in the
India House two years afterwards. This was succeeded
by the Elements of Political Economy in 182 1, and a
* B2Lm*s fames Mill, p. 334.
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1 8 LIFE OF
series of most important articles in the supplement to the
Encyclopedia Britannica^ of which the most famous was
the one on " Government." It is not too much to say
that the essay on Government became the text-book of
philosophic radicalism for the whole school of Ben-
thamites and Utilitarians, and was in large measure
instrumental in that formation of progressive opinion
which culminated with the Reform Bill. In 1822 Mill
began his chief philosophical treatise, The Analysis of the
Human Mind, which was not published till 1829. It is
an enquiry into mental phenomena on the lines of the
English school of Locke and Hume, and is especially
remarkable for the use made of Hartley's principle of the
Association of Ideas. The next few years witnessed a rapid
rise in official position at the India House, and a brilliant
series of essays, principally published in the Westminster
Review. In 1824, he attacked the Edinburgh and the
Quarterly in a couple of articles, which signalised the
position of the new democratic school as against the
Whigs on the one hand and the Tories on the other.
The following year was remarkable for the foundation of
the University of London, towards which Mill lent a
helping hand, and for a destructive criticism on Southey's
Book of the Churchy in which Mill revealed the width of
his divergence from the views of orthodoxy and the eccle-
siastical establishment. The Fragment on Mackintosh
was published in 1835, and offended even his friends by
the violence of its attack on Mackintosh's ethical philo-
sophy. An article on the Church and its reform in the
London Review was succeeded by one on Law Reform
in the same periodical. The last year of his life, 1836, was
marked by two essays, one on Aristocracy, the other a
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JOHN STUART MILL, . 19
dialogue, " Whether Political Economy is Useful," com-
posed in the midst of considerable physical suffering, to
which he succumbed on June 23rd. His career at the
India House had been uniformly successful. Appointed
an assistant to the Examiner of Indian Corres-
pondence, at a salary of ;;^8oo a-year in 1819, he
became second assistant in 182 1 with a salary of ;^i 000.
Two years afterwards he obtained a further rise to
;^i2oo; a vacancy, which was thus created, leading to
John's appointment as a junior clerk. In 1830 he was
made Examiner, with a salary of ;^i9oo, which was
subsequently raised to ;;^2ooo on the 17th February,
1836, four months before his death. At their father's
death, all his nine children were alive. The second son,
James, had gone to India with an appointment in the
Civil Service, but the rest were at home, and had been so
almost throughout. None of the children, however, seem
to have been constitutionally strong. The eldest girl,
Wilhelmina, named after Sir John Stuarfs daughter,
the heroine of the passion of Scott, died in 1861 ; James
died in 1862 ; Henry, the third son, died of consumption
at Falmouth in 1840 ; while the fourth son, George,
who had entered the India Office, died of disease of the
lungs at Madeira in 1853. "It is apparent," says Dr.
Bain, " that while the father's fine quality of brain was
not wanting in the children generally, John, besides
other advantages, was single in possessing the physical
endurance that was needed for maturing a first-class
intellect."*
The chief characteristic of James Mill is a certain v.
hardness of fibre, which explains at once his intellectual
* Bain : James Mill, p. 334.
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20
UFE OF
success, and the limitations of his character. In his
>_ political theories, in his studies in jurisprudence and
political economy, in his more abstruse speculations, in
his modes of instruction, in his relations to his friends,
in the daily commerce of his domestic life, in every
sphere and mode of his activity, there is one predominant
spirit, one note which is recurrent through all the diverse
/'jharmonies — the pervading and unmistakable influence
/ V of the eighteenth century. Cold, inquisitive, and critical,
there is nothing which such a spirit will not analyse,
nothing which it will not dare to comprehend. Hence,
its clearness, its rationality, its h priori method ; hence,
too, its unimaginativeness, its want of sympathy, its
essential one-sidedness. To it the complex motives of
/humanity appear simple, because, by an arbitrary
1 hypothesis, it can reduce them to one primary motive^
. |the desire for happiness ; psychology is all explained by
jthe theory of association ; morals by the principle of the
greatest happiness of the greatest number. It is the
victim of phrases, of which it ignores the dominion. It
appeals throughout to experience, and yet its method is
consciously or unconsciously deductive. The very first
principles fronji rwhich it deduces are so little axiomatic
that they are just the ones most abundantly controverted.
v^The reason to which it appeals is that which, because
divorced from the sphere of feeling and passion, instead
of comprehending it in some initial synthesis, is sure to
betray its ultimate impotence. Half of the instincts of
humanity, poetry and art, religion and literature, remain
for it a sealed book, to be either blindly ignored pr
fatally discarded Yet within its own realm it is master-
fully lucid and self-sufficient. It will brook no sophisms,
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JOHN STUART MILL. 21
it will clear away all fallacies, it will admit of no
superiors, and if it is not omnipotent, it is because it has
undertaken with a single reagent to detect all the elements
of a complex universe.
Abundant evidence can be found in James Mill's career
of the existence of many of these traits. He was only,
perhaps, in some respects an original thinker ; in other
respects he faithfully reproduced the lineaments of his two
great teachers, Hartley and Bentham. Indeed, he some-
what improved on his examples ; it was his task to cut the
edges more clearly and sharply. Those who have read
Hartley's Observations on Man^ know that he somewhat
encumbers his main principle of Associationism by a
number of collateral considerations, and enfeebles it by
connecting it with a delusive physiological hypothesis of
vibrations. In Mill's Analysis^ the association principle
appears in simple and decisive form ; he will even "better
his instruction," for all modes of association are to be
reduced to the single one of contiguity. In Bentham,
the utility principle is the key to explain both ethics and
politics ; it is left to Mill to apply it rigorously to all
constitutional forms, and to make a rigidly deductive
theory of the one possible government of democracy. In
both cases, the logical precision and the analytic excess
are equally unfortunate. His attempted simplification of
the associative principles in the mind of man to the one
case of association by contiguity, is regarded by John
Stuart Mill as •* perhaps the least successful attempt at
a generalisation and simplification of the laws of mental
phenomena to be found in the work." Room must, at
least, be found for association by means of resemblance,
as well as that by means of contiguity. " The attempt
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Z'
22 UFE OF
to resolve association by resemblance into association by
contiguity miist, perforce, be unsuccessful, inasmuch as
there never could have been association by contiguity
without a previous association by resemblance. There
is a law of association anterior to and presupposed
by the law of contiguity — namely, that the sensa
tion tends to recall what is called the idea of itself,
that is, the remembrance of a sensation like itself, if such
has previously been experienced."* This is, perhaps, a
merely technical point, and, as such, one which could only
be significant to the psychologist Shall we look then at
the wider issues involved in Mill's essay on Govern-
ment ? The whole is an ^ priori piece of reasoning,
which depends on the following principles. The end of
government is the securing of the greatest well-being to
the people at large. Now, no one acts against his own
interest; therefore, the ends of government are best
secured by the people (by means of adequate repre-
sentation) governing themselves. Monarchy, aristocracy,
oligarchy, are necessarily to be condemned. Why?
Because in each case the governing body will act for its
own interest alone, and this interest in the supposed
cases is by no means identical with the interest of
the people, but rather opposed and antithetical to it.
Such is the rigidly logical framework of Mill's political
views. Unfortunately, objection can be made both to
its method and some of its practical conclusions. Is the
method of political inquiry to be thus strictly deductive ?
Can we deduce the science of government from the laws
of human nature ? Can the teaching of actual experience
* Mill's Analysis. Edition of 1869, pp. in, 112. Note by
J. S. Mill.
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JOHN STUART MILL, 23
be ignored? One of the most successful parts of
Macaulay's criticism on the essay deals with this point.
"How," Macaulay asks, "are we to arrive at just
conclusions on a subject so important to the happiness
of mankind ? Surely, by that method which, in every
experimental science to which it has been applied, has
signally increased the power and knowledge of our
species ; by that method for which our new philosophers
would substitute quibbles scarcely worthy of the bar-
barous respondents and opponents of the middle ages,
by the one method of induction; by observing the
present state of the world, by assiduously studying the
history of past ages, by sifting the evidence of facts, by
carefully combining and contrasting those which are
authentic, by generalising with judgment and diffidence,
by perpetually bringing the theory which we have
constructed to the test of new facts, by correcting or
altogether abandoning it, according as these new facts
prove it to be partially or fundamentally unsound."* Is
this merely the facile rhetoric of a professed opponent ?
Not so, for when J. S. Mill, in the sixth book of
his Logic^ came to the construction of his science
of Sociology, he adopted the same line of criticism
in his chapter on the abstract or geometrical method
of the interest philosophy of Bentham's school. The
cold rationalism of the father has to be corrected by a
return to that experience on which his school professed
to rely in their logic and metaphysics. Perhaps a more
decisive instance can be found in James Mill's essay
on Education, which was published, together with
the essay on Government, in the supplement to the
* Edinburgh Review ^ March 1829.
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y
24 UFE OF
Encyclopadia Brttanntca, And here we cannot do better
than quote the opinion of Dr. Bain, who, in most points,
sympathises with James Mill. " The ct priori or deduc-
tive handling is here exclusively carried out The author
hardly ever cites an actual experience in education ; far
less has he a body of experience summed up in empirical
laws to confront and compare with the deductions from
the theory of the human mind. One would think that
he had never been either a learner or a teacher, so little
does he avail himself of the facts or maxims of the work
of the school"* In such points we can see how the
logical mind of the eighteenth-century rationalist failed
to correspond to the many-hued panorama of human life,
how it produced a pictiu*e with clear, hard, positive
outlines, which was untouched with the grace of flowing
contours, and unsoftened by the changing effects of mist
and cloud.
The same hardness of fibre can be seen both in his
personal demeanour and in his literary tastes. In his
relations to his children and his friends he carefully
deprecated all feeling and emotion, as we know by the
express declaration of his son. Especially in his attitude
to his elder son he seems to have been a hard taskmaster,
frequently requiring the infant prodigy to produce bricks
without straw. The failure in social relations was, above
J all, due to the defect of imagination and sympathy — ^a
defect which was exaggerated by his careful avoidance of
the lighter Kterature in his private reading. In his
commonplace book, which was presented to the London
Library by his son, we find numerous citations from
historians, from philosophers, from statesmen, from legal
* Bain ; James Mill^ p. 247.
i
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JOHN STUART MILL. 25
writers, from theologians ; but his reading does not appear
to have been extensive in the Belles Lettres, and the few
poets to which he does refer he cites for purposes other
than the purely literary. We can never imagine him
tormenting himself, as his son did during a crisis in
his career, with the possible exhaustibility of musical
combinations. Still less would he have taken the
trouble to write down "Thoughts upon Poetry and
its variations," or have appreciated the rising genius of
Tennyson, or have attempted to sympathise with Carlyle
and Coleridge. His very scepticism is different from ours.
He attacks ecclesiastical establishments, and rails against
the Church, singling out Laud for an onslaught which
equals in fury the subsequent attack on Mackintosh. He
began, apparently, by being a Deist, and then, troubled -
by the moral difficulties of the Divine rule, he became a
negationist, pure and simple. But his scepticism was
clear and logical, and limited to intellectual issues. It
had none of that emotional accompaniment which comes
out here and there in J. S. Mill's essay on Theism. It
was absolutely devoid of that sense of mystery, and that
moral feeling and sympathy for men, which makes so
much of the current scepticism of our day sceptical even
of itself.
There were other effects, however, of such a tempera-
ment as James Mill's on which it would be unjust not to
insist. The same hardness of fibre which made him
educate his son according to the principles of pure logic,
made him also a valuable instrument in the cause of
political reform, and a real source of intellectual inspira-
tion among his friends and associates. There can be no
question that Mill's writings, both in the Encyclopedia
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26 LIFE OF
and the Westminster Review^ gave direction and impetus
to the Reform movement, which culminated in 1832. It
is doubtful whether any other man at this period could
have done so great and so valuable service. Macaulay,
it must be remembered, had passed through Mill's
school, and had been in close contact with Mill's
disciples at Cambridge before he advocated the Reform
Bill. Moreover, Mill's logical acuteness and practical
ability stood him in good stead. He was neither so
crotchetty as Cobbett, nor so violent as Orator Hunt,
nor did he so wantonly affront his country's feelings
as Richard Carlile. Even Bentham could not have
sufficed for the crisis without him. In Bentham's
Reform Catechism, which was published in 181 7, there
was an outspoken advocacy of Universal Suffrage. Mill's
principles also pointed in the same direction, but he was
wise enough to see that there were certain preliminary
steps which were indispensable, such as a National
Education and the enfranchisement of the middle
classes. It is an honourable trait in both the Mills,
that though they sympathised to the full with the
working classes, they refused to hold out to them
delusive hopes — such as the raising of wages by legis-
lation. To the industrial middle class Mill especially
appealed, and it was Birmingham and Manchester which
secured the passing of the Reform Bill.
Nor had Mill inferior influence in the intellectual than
he had in the political world. Here the chief agency was
the truly Socratic engine of conversation. Let us listen to
Grote's testimony in the article he subsequently wrote on
J. S. Mill's Examination of Sir W, Hamilton:— ''1^\^
unpremeditated oral exposition was hardly less effective
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JOHN S TUART MILL, 27
than his prepared work with the pen; his colloquial
fertility on philosophic subjects, his power of dis-
cussing and of stimulating others to discuss, his ready
responsive inspirations through all the shifts and wind-
ings of a sort of Platonic dialogue— all these accom-
plishments were, to those who knew him, even more
impressive than what he composed for the press.
Conversation with him was not merely instructive, but
provocative to the dormant intelligence. Of all persons
whom we have known, Mr. James Mill was the one who
stood least remote from the Platonic ideal of Dialectic —
Tov ZiZdvo.1 Kai Sex^a-dai Xoyov — (the giving and receiving
of reasons), competent alike to examine others, or be
examined by them in philosophy." The son's tribute is
equally impressive : — " My father," he says in the Aufo-
biography^ " exercised a far greater personal ascendency
than Bentham. He was sought for the vigour and
instructiveness of his conversation, and used it largely
as an instrument for the diffusion of his opinions. I
have never known any man who could do such ample
justice to his best thoughts in colloquial discussion.
His perfect command over his great mental resources,
the terseness and expressiveness of his language, and the
moral earnestness, as well as intellectual force of his
delivery, made him one of the most striking of all
argumentative conversers. ... It was not solely, or
even chiefly, in diffusing his merely intellectual convic-
tions that his power showed itself: it was still more
through the influence of a quality, of which I have only
since learnt to appreciate the extreme rarity, that exalted
public spirit and regard above all things to the good of
the whole, which warmed into life and activity every
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28 LIFE OF JOHN STUART MILL. '
germ of similar virtue that existed in the minds he came
in contact with." The latter lesson was assuredly not
lost on the son, and though he was never a conver-
sationalist like his father, no man ever displayed a graver
or more sustained devotion to the public good.
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CHAPTER 11.
"a disquisitive youth'' — (1806-1823).
WHEN Mr. Roebuck came over from America,
about 1824 or 1825, to enter the English bar,
he called on a relative of his, Thomas Love
Peacock, at the India House, where the latter was
Examiner of India Correspondence. Mr. Peacock, the
friend of Shelley, and himself a poet as well as a novelist,
introduced Roebuck to a young man of eighteen, who
had but lately become a clerk in the office, and whom he
described as "a disquisitive youth.'* The young man
was John Stuart Mill. It is possible to trace some
likeness either to Mill, or more probably to his father,
in the personage of Mr. MacQuedy, described as a
political economist, whom Peacock introduces in his
amusing tale of Crotchet Castle. For Mr. MacQuedy's
name is derived from the letters Q.E.D., and the
economist himself would thus figure — with an unmis-
takable reference to his logical attainments— as " the son
of a demonstration." *
* According to a note in an article in the Quarterly Review for
October 1888 (p. 357), even the incident of Mr. MacQuedy pro-
posing to read his paper after dinner is founded on Peacock's
experiences of a dinner with Mill.
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30 LIFE OF
Be this as it may, the "disquisitive youth" undoubtedly
deserved the description which his senior at the India
House gave of him. He had, despite his youth, inquired
very widely in different subjects, and had already
attained a very considerable reputation as a writer, a
thinker, and a reformer. He had begun the study of
Psychology in the School of Condillac, and continued it
in the writings of Locke and Hartley, Hume and Reid.
He had perused the history of the French Revolution ;
he had studied I-aw with Austin ; above all, he had a
profound acquaintance with the works of Bentham,
through the medium especially of Dumont's Traites de
Lkgislation, He had written in the Traveller and in the
Chronicle^ as well as in the Westminster Review. He
had been much exercised with regard to the Richard
Carlile prosecutions for heresy, and had formed an
Utilitarian Society at Bentham's house. Above all, he
was known as the son of James .Mill, the celebrated
historian of India, and the author of that Essay on
Government against which Macaulay was afterwards to
bring the battery of his rhetoric ; and in his own person
he was talked about as having been subjected to one
of the most extraordinary experiments in education
which had probably ever been attempted.
The early education of John Stuart Mill has not yet
ceased to be the marvel which it appeared to his own
and his father's contemporaries. In the first place, as he
himself remarks in his Autobiography^ he is " one of the
very few examples in this country of one who has not
thrown off religious belief, but never had it : I grew up
in a negative state with regard to it. I looked upon
the modern exactly as I did upon the ancient religion
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JOHN STUART MILL, 31
as something which in no way concerned me. It did
not seem to me more strange that English people should
believe what I did not, than that the men I read of in
Herodotus should have done so. History had made
the variety of opinions among mankind a fact familiar to
me, and this was but a prolongation of that fact."* But
the Agnostic Who is not made but born is not, perhaps,
so noteworthy as the youth who acquires the secondary
education before he gets the primary. A simple enumer-
ation of Mill's studies in his earlier years is enough to
startle the youngest and most ardent of schoolmasters.
Some discussion has lately taken place between the
Head-Masters of our Public Schools as to the age at
which the learning of Greek should begin, and the
reformers seem inclined to fix it somewhat later in the
school curriculum than has been hitherto the custom.
Mill began Greek at the age of three. From his third
to his eighth year (at which time Latin was commenced)
he principally studied Greek, English, and Arithmetic,
and the Greek came first. " My earliest recollection on
the subject is that of committing to memory what my
father termed vocables, being lists of common Greek
words, with their significations in English, which he
wrote out for me on cards. Of Grammar, until some
years later, I learnt no more than the inflexions of the
nouns and verbs, but after a course of vocables, pro-
ceeded at once to translation ; and I faintly remember
going through -^sop's Fables^ the first Greek book which
I read. The Anabasis^ which I remember better, was
the second,"! The following is the list of authors read
between 1809 and 18 14 — that is, between the years of
* Autobiography y p. 43. t Ibid^ p. 5.
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32 LIFE OF
three and eight. In Greek : iEsop's Fables^ Xenophon's
Anabasis^ Cyropadia^ and Memorabilia^ Herodotus, parts
of Diogenes Laertius, part of Lucian, two speeches of
Isocrates, and the first six Dialogues of Plato (in the
common arrangement), from Euthyphro to Thesetetus.
In English we have principally histories : Robertson,
Hume, Gibbon, Watson's Philip the Secbnd and Third
(his greatest favourite), Hooke's History of Rome (his
favourite after Watson), RoUin in English, Langhorne's
Plutarch^ Burnet's Own Time^ the history in the Annual
Register, To these, on general subjects, must be added :
Millar on the English Government, Mosheim, M'Cree's
Knox^ the voyages and travels of Anson and Cook,
Robinson Crusoe^ Arabian Nights^ Don Quixote^ Miss
Edgeworth's Tales, and Brooke's Fool of Quality, The
Arithmetic was the task of the evenings, and Mill admits
that he found it disagreeable..
In his eighth year he began, as has been already said,
Latin, and learnt it in conjunction with a younger sister,
to whom he taught it as he went on. Other brothers
and sisters were successively added to his list of pupils,
though the task of instruction seems to have been
especially irksome. From 1814 to 18 18 his chief
studies were in Latin, in Greek, and in Mathematics.
He mentions, amongst others, the following authors: —
Virgil, Horace, Phsedrus, Livy, Sallust, Ovid, Terence,
Lucretius, Cicero, Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Aris-
tophanes, Thucydides, Demosthenes, ^schines, Theo-
critus, Anacreon, Polybius, and, strangest book of all
to read at the age of eleven, Aristotle's Rhetoric^ which
his father made him analyse and throw into synoptic
tables. In Mathematics he learnt elementary geometry
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JOHN STUART MILL. 7,7,
and algebra thoroughly, and the differential calculus, and
other portions of the higher mathematics, "far from
thoroughly." In private work, he especially studied
Mitford's Greece^ having been warned by his father
against its Tory prejudices, and tried to compose a
history of the Roman Government, compiled with the
assistance of Hooke, from Livy and Dionysius. The
last is a significant feature, for what especially interested
him was the struggle between the patricians and
plebeians, in which he enlisted himself as a champion
of the growing democracy. But of other compositions
he does not appear to have been fond. He never
composed at all in Greek, even in prose, and but little
in Latin. He wrote, however, some poetry in the style
of Pope's Horner^ sl book which first revealed to him the
beauty of the Greek epic, and translated into English
metre some of Horace's shorter poems. In English
poetry as such he had no regular education, for his
father disliked the English idolatry paid to Shakespeare^
and only admired Milton, Goldsmith, Bums, and, to
some extent, Spenser. The son added to the meagre
list the poems of Sir Walter Scott, Dryden, Cowper, and
Campbell. The absence of so much of the humaner
studies was compensated for by experimental science.
" I never remember being so wrapt up in any book as I
was in Joyce's Scientific Dialogues ; — I devoured treatises
on Chemistry."*
From the age of twelve (18 18) a higher course of
study begins, especially Logic and Political Economy.
In Logic, Mill commences with Aristotle's Organon^ and
reads it to the Analytica^ profiting little, however, by the
* Autobiography^ p. 17,
3
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34 LIFE OF
Analytica Posteriora^ which belong to a branch of
speculation for which he was not yet ripe. Latin
treatises on the scholastic logic follow, and a work of
much higher order of thought, Hobbes' Computatio sive
Logica, Mill's practice was to accompany his father in
his walks, and to give him a minute account of each
day's work, answering his searching questions. The
foundations for the first book of his Logic were
undoubtedly laid in these early promenades. "I well
remember how and in what particular walk, in the
neighbourhood of Bagshot Heath, [my father] first
attempted by questions to make me think on the
subject, and frame some conception of what constituted
the utility of the syllogistic logic ; and when I failed in
this, to make me understand it by explanations. The
explanations did not make the matter at all clear to me
at the time j but they were not, therefore, useless — they
remained as a nucleus for my observations and reflections
to crystallise upon ; the import of his general remarks
being interpreted to me by the particular instances which
came under my notice afterwards."* Some of the most
important dialogues of Plato were read at this time,
especially the Gorgias, the Protagoras, and the Republic ;
and James Mill's History of India was minutely studied.
But in 1819 (age thirteen) the new study is Political
Economy. Mill's father took him through a complete
course on this subject, beginning with daily lectures in
his walks, and then introducing his son to the works of
Ricardo and Adam Smith.
What judgment are we to form of this remarkable
education ? It is obvious that we cannot estimate it as
* Autobiography, pp. 18, 19.
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JOHN STUART MILL. 35
either bad or good, except in reference to the objects for
which it was designed, and the purpose it was intended to
fulfil. /James Mill wished to educate his son to carry——
out his own work, to make a thinker after his own—*"
likeness7and especially to save his pupil from some of. —
what he deemed the wasteful and unnecessary parts of ^ — '
his own development The son, therefore, need not go
through the same steps as the father, but commence
almost at the very point which the older thinker had
attairiedT Tie musri)egfar1)y being at once a radical
-^ — politician, a free-thinker, and a logician. From this- —
point of view, the education was a success ; and Mill
may be said, like a second Athene, to have leapt from
the head of his father fully armed. But the cost was
not inconsiderable, as can be seen from Mill's own
admissions in his Autobiography; and the father
himself must have experienced some disappointment
when he discovered later on, in 1826 and onwards, how
much his son was destined to differ from himself. It is
true that the education at least proved that more can
be taught in early years than is commonly thought
possible, but there are certain considerations tending to
lessen the importance of this result which are worth
attention, and which, perhaps, make the experiment a
warning rather than an example. In the first place^
there does not appear to have been much real affection
between the teacher and the pupil, though there was, of
course, respectful obedience and loyalty. Mill's own
words are decisive on this point. "The element," he
says, "which was chiefly deficient in his [the father's]
moral relation to his children was that of tenderness. I
do not believe that this deficiency lay in his own nature.
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^v
36 LIFE OF
He resembled most Englishmen in being ashamed of
the signs of feeling, and, by the absence of demonstra-
tion, starving the feelings themselves. If we consider,
further, that he was in the trying position of sole teacher,
and add to this that his temper was constitutionally
irritable, it is impossible not to feel true pity for a father
who did, and strove to do, so much for his children,
who would have so valued their affection, yet who must
have been constantly feeling that fear of him was drying
it up at its source. This was no longer the case later
in life, and with his younger children. They loved him
tenderly ; and if I cannot say so much of myself, I was
always loyally devoted to him." This is not otherwise
than a sad picture, especially in the case of a man who
had such singularly fine and strong feeling as John
Stuart Mill himself. An even stronger remark follows,
which throws light on the lEact that there was not much
sympathy in the relationship. " I do not believe that
fear, as an element in education, can be dispensed with ;
but I am sure that it ought not to be the main element ;
and when it predominates so much as to preclude love
and confidence on the part of the child to those who
should be the unreservedly trusted advisers of after
years, and, perhaps, to seal up the fountains of frank and
spontaneous communicativeness in the child's nature, it
is an evil for which a large abatement must be made
from the benefits, moral and intellectual, which may
flow from any other part of the education.'** Will
it be said that Mill is only making a generalisation
in this passage? It may be so, but, at least, it is
a generalisation which appears to be prompted by
* Autobiography^ pp. 51-53.
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JOHN STUART MILL. n
his own specific experience. For, now and again, he
seems to suggest that his father was not very just or
reasonable in his demands. When he was trying to
learn the higher mathematics, he was continually incur-
ring his teacher's displeasure by his inability to solve
problems for which that teacher did not see that he had
not the necessary previous knowledge. At the age of
thirteen the unhappy boy is expected to be able to
define the word "idea," and incurs much displeasure
when he naturally fails. And when he is unlucky enough
to use the common expression that something was true
in theory but required correction in practice, his in-
structor, trained in Bentham's refutation of Common
Fallacies, is highly indignant at what he appeared to
think was unparalleled ignorance on the part of a mere
child.
Nor can it be doubted that young Mill had to read a
great many things which it was impossible that he should
understand, and that, therefore, there was actual loss of
time in the educational process. He confesses that to
read Plato's Theatetus at the age of seven was a mistake,
which it assuredly was. "But my father, in all his
teaching, demanded of me not only the utmost that I
could do, but much that I could by no possibility have
done." What are we to think of an analysis of
Aristotle's Rhetoric made by a boy of eleven, or the first
four books of Aristotle's Organon tabulated in synoptic
tables a year later? Can it be imagined that the boy
could get any real, rememberable knowledge of so
difficult an author at so early a period ? It would have
been interesting to see the synoptic tables before coming
to a conclusion on this matter, but we may perhaps
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38 LIFE OF
throw some light on it in other ways. At the age of six
and a-half, after a considerable course of reading in
history, Mill begins to write a history of Rome, which
has been, fortunately, preserved by a lady friend of the
family, The sketch is very short, equal to about four or
five printed pages, but, as Dr. Bain (who quotes from it)
remarks,* it shows that his enormous reading had as yet
done little for him. In 1820, six years after he had
begun Latin, when he was fourteen, he writes a Latin
letter to his sisters, which is by no means a fine
composition, and which would, perhaps, be surpassed
by^ any clever school boy of the same age.f v Perhaps
a more significant comment on his early education is
fiimished by his later writings. They do not abound,
as we should naturally expect from the enormous
mass of literature which he had absorbed, in either
direct quotations or those refined allusions to which men
of hterary attainments and scholars, as a rule, accustom
us. On the contrary, they are somewhat poor in this
respect. Yet, if ever any man had a chance of showing
* Bain :/. S, Mill^ p. 3.
t The following is the letter in question :— Johannes carissimis
sororibus Williaminse atque Clarae salutenu Credo vos laetaturas
epistolse conspectu: Latine scribo pro vobis in ea linguS. exercendis :
Gaudeo i patre audiisse vos in historia Graeca vosmetipsas instruere:
studium euim illud maxime est necessarium omnibus, seu juvenibus,
seu puellis. Mihi condonetis quaeso si quern errorem in Latine
scribendo feci, quippe semper in nomen Gallicum insido, cum
quaeram Latinum. Ricardo Doaneo dicatis me non locum in
litteris his habuisse, ut illi scriberem ; itaque mihi non irascatur.
Scribatis mihi precor, si possitis, Latine, sin minus Anglice.
Forte hanc epistolam difEcilem ad legendum et traducendum
invenietis ; sed vos exercebit Valeatis. xiii, Kal. Aug. 1820.
Vesperi ad hora. —
^
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JOHN STUART MILL. 39
extensive reading and wide acquaintance with literature,
it was John Stuart Mill. But the fact seems to be that
memory and culture depend largely on the practice of
the imagination in early years. The youthful mind is
not very receptive of facts, but is always alive to the
imaginative treatment of facts. Plato, in his Republic^
gives utterance to a striking paradox on this matter.
When he is discussing the primary education, he says
that instruction must first begin with falsehoods, by
which he means mythical tales. Now, the culture of the
imagination was a necessity which Mill only recognised
later, at the time of his so-called crisis. He makes
the remark about his father that he had never sufficiently
cared for the concrete illustration of the truths which he
desired to instil " A defect running through his other-
wise admirable modes of instruction, as it did through all
his modes of thought, was that of trusting too much
to the intelligibleness of the abstract, when not embodied
in the concrete." If that was so, have we not here an
important commentary on the difference between study
and knowledge? Of Mill's study we have enough
evidence, but of its results we can not be so sure.
There is, at all events, some reason for thinking that less
application and a larger imaginative exercise might not,
perhaps, have produced so precocious a logician, but
would possibly have formed a deeper and more con-
sistent thinker. He was aware of this himself when he
was talking to Caroline Fox at Falmouth. "This
method of early, intense application he would not
recommend to others; in most cases it would net
answer, and where it does, the buoyancy of youth is
entirely superseded by the maturity of manhood, and
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40 UFE OF
action is very likely to be merged in reflection. *I
never was a boy,' he said, * never played at cricket ; it is
better to let Nature have her own way.'"* "I never
was a boy " is the most pathetic reproach that a son can
ever address to his &ther on the management of his
youthful years.
But James Mill was too much in earnest with his
scheme to care much for letting Nature have her own
way. I^ as has been said, he wished to make his son a
logician and a reformer, he certainly succeeded. The
early studies in Aristotle and the school-logic, the early
acquaintance with the Socratic method of inquiry, gained
by a perusal of the Platonic dialogues, the diligent work
of comparing Ricardo with Adam Smith — all bore
abundant fruit The first intellectual operation in which
the young Mill arrived at any proficiency was, as he
himself says, dissecting a bad argument, and finding in
what part the fallacy lay. The Socratic " denchus," as
an education for precise thinking, took such hold of him
that it became part of his own mind. "I do not
believe," he says, " that any scientific teaching ever was
more thorough or better fitted for training the faculties
than the mode in which logic and political economy
were taught to me by my father. Striving, eVen in an
exaggerated degree, to call forth the activity of my
•faculties, by making me find out everything for myself,
he gave his explanations not before, but after, I had felt
the full force of the difficulties ; and not only gave me
an accurate knowledge of these two great subjects, as far
as they were then understood, but made me a thinker on
both." The worst of early proficiency, however, is its
* /oumals of Caroline Fox^ i., 163, 164.
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JOHN STUART MILL. 41
effects on manners and behaviour. Mill is so entirely
truthful about himself that he himself notices this defect.
He says that various persons who saw him in his childhood
thought him "greatly and disagreeably self-conceited,"
though he does not believe that this was really the case.
He traces the effect on other people to the fact that
he was disputatious, and did not scruple to give direct
contradictions to things which had been said in his
hearing. Doubtless he acquired this bad habit from
having been encouraged in an unusual degree to talk on
matters beyond his age, and with grown persons, while
the usual respect had never been inculcated on him.
It should, however, be added that when he was abroad
with Lady Bentham, she took some pains with his
manners, and that he took her criticisms very well. In
his diary, he remarks that the family of Sir Samuel
Bentham were very kind in constantly, without ill-
f Rumour, explaining to him the defects in his way of
conducting himself in society; for this, he says, "I
O' ought to be very thankful.*' But he never was a boy ;
no holidays were allowed hinTas long as he was under
\ his father; he could do no feats of skill in physical
strength, and knew none of the ordinary bodily exercises.
His father saved him, it may be, from the demoralising
effects of school-life, but made no effort to provide him with
any sufficient substitute for its practicalising influences.
The external history of the years up to 1820 was
almost entirely uneventful. Bom on May 20th, 1806, in
the house now No. 13 Rodney Street, Pentonville, Mill
lived with his father and his father's friends, Ricardo,
Joseph Hume, and Bentham. At the age of three he
paid his first visit to Bentham at Barrow Green. When
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no
9.
O
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J
y
42 UFE OF
five years old he was taken to see Lady Spencer,
whose husband, Lord Spencer, was at the head of the
Admiralty, and is said to have kept up an animated con-
versation with his hostess on the comparative merits of
Marlborough and Wellington. In 18 14 his family went
to stay with Bentham at his new residence, Ford Abbey,
in Somersetshire, and just before this date the two
Mills and Bentham made an excursion, which included
visits to Oxford, Bath, Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth, and
Portsmouth. The tour had an important result for
Mill, for at Gosport he made the acquaintance of
Bentham's brother. General Sir Samuel Bentham, at
that time superintendent of the Portsmouth Dockyard,
Mill was, in consequence, in 1820, invited to visit him
and his &mily (consisting of Lady Bentham, one son,
George, and three daughters, all older than Mill) for
six months in the south of France, a visit which was
ultimately prolonged to nearly a twelvemonth.
Mill wrote a diary of this important event in his early
career. He left London on the 15th May 1820, when
he was nearly foiuteen, travelled to Paris, where he pre-
sented an introduction to M. Say, the political economist,
and, as it is pleasant to note any childish incident
in so grave a youth-time, played on a hot Sunday (May
21) at battledore and shuttlecock with Alfred Say, the
youngest son of the house. Afler nine days' stay at
Paris, he started by himself to join the Benthams,
who were living at a chateau belonging to the Marquis
de Pompignan, a few miles from Toulouse. Of the
journey, which took four days. Dr. Bain gives the
following account.* " Mill makes a blunder in choosing
♦ Bain : /. S. Milly p. 12.
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JOHN STUART MILL. 43
the cabriolet of the diligence, and finds himself in low
company. At Orleans, a butcher, with the largest belly
he had ever seen, came in and kept incessantly smoking.
On the third day he is at Limoges, and breakfasts in
company with a good-natured gentleman from the
interior ; but his own company does not much improve ;
the butcher leaves, but a very dirty yf//(f, with an eruption
in her face, keeps up his annoyance. The following day
a vacancy occurs in the interior, and he claims it as the
passenger of longest standing ; a lady contests it with
him, and it has to be referred to the maire^ the retiring
passenger, a young avocat pleading his case. He is now
in good company, and his account of the successive
localities is minute and cheerful. He arrives at his
destination at two a.m. the 2nd of June, is received
by Mr. George Bentham, and meets the family at
breakfast."
The daily record of his life contains his items of work
and his experiences in the neighbourhood. He appears
to have risen early, worked hard at French, Greek, Latin,
and the higher Mathematics; attempted to learn to
dance, sing, fence, and ride, but, as he himself says,
without obtaining any proficiency in the latter exercises ;
and taken every opportunity of extending his acquaint-
ance with France, the country, the people, and the
institutions. One day reads very much like another in
the diary of this studious youth. "July 7th. Rose 5^ ;
five chapters Voltaire till 7 ; till 7^, 46 lines of Virgil ;
till 8, Lucian's Jupiter Confutatu5\ goes on a family
errand ; music lesson till 9 ; Lucian continued till 9 J^,
and finished after breakfast at 10^ ; a call required him
to dress; read Thomson and made Tables till 12X ;
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44 LIFE OF
seven propositions of Legendre; has him over the
coals for his confusion in regard to ratio, — ' takes away
a good deal of my opinion of the merit of the work
as an elementary work ; ' till i J^ wrote exercises and
various miscellanies ; till 2j^, the treatise on Adverbs;
till 3l<, Thomson ; Livre Gkographique and Miscellanies
till 5 ; eats a little, dinner being uncertain, owing to a
family event; goes for first lesson to music-mistress, a
lady reduced by the Revolution, and living by her
musical talents; henceforth to practise at her house
daily from ii to 12, and take a lesson in the evening;
dined on return, then dancing lesson." The day will
serve as a sample for the rest. Mill accompanied the
Benthams in an excursion to the Pyrenees, stayed for
some time at Bagnferes de Bigorre, made a journey to
Pau, Bayonne, and Bagnferes de Luchon, and ascended
the Pic du Midi de Bigorre. He notices himself the
impression which this introduction to mountain scenery
made upon his receptive mind : " Mais jamais je
n'oublierai la viie du cot^ meridional ! " He further
went to Montpelier, where Sir Samuel had bought
the estate of Restinclifere.
Apart from the wider experience gained from this visit
to another country. Mill derived other lessons from his
stay with the Benthams. He was struck by the differ-
ence between the English and French nations, and
contrasted their characteristics much to the advantage
of the latter. On the one side there was the frank
sociability and amiability of French personal intercourse ;
on the other, there was the English mode of existence,
in which everybody else was either an enemy or a bore.
He found, it is true, that in France the bad as well as
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JOHN STUART MILL. 45
the good points, both of individual and of national
character, came more to the surface, and broke out more
fearlessly in ordinary intercourse, than in England. But
while in France the general habit of the people is to
show, as well as to expect, friendly feeling in every one
towards every other, wherever there is not some positive
cause for the opposite ; in England, it is only of the best
bred people in the upper or upper-middle ranks that
anything like this can be said. From the French society
which he saw in Paris in the company of men like M.
Say and M. Saint-Simon (the latter of whom he saw but
once), he derived his interest in foreign politics, which
came out conspicuously in after years. " The chief fruit
which I carried away was a strong and permanent
interest in Continental Liberalism, of which I ever after-
wards kept myself au courant^ as much as of English
politics — z. thing not at all usual in those days with
Englishmen, and which had a very salutary influence on
my development, keeping me free from the error always
prevalent in England, and from which even my father,
with all his superiority to prejudice, was not exempt,
of judging universal questions by a merely English
standard."*
Mill returned to England in July 182 1, and com-
menced with ardour the life of a young man of promise,
whom his father was understood to have trained after
his own model. The two years before his official life
was commenced as a clerk in the India House were
spent in numerous studies in history and philosophy,
and in literary composition. In 1822, for instancy he
read up the history of the French Revolution, studied law
* ^fil^s Autobiography y p, 61.
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46 LIFE OF
with John Austin (for he was then intended for the
bar), perased and deeply admired Dumont on Bentham,
worked through much English philosophy, began his
intimacy with Grote, and entered the arena of literary
life by. writing in the Traveller newspaper. In the same
year, having made acquaintance with many young men
resident in Cambridge, who afterwards came to London
— such as Macaulay, Hyde and Charles Villiers, Strutt
(Lord Belper), and Romilly — he went to Cambridge on
a visit to Charles Austin, the younger brother of John
Austin. This visit is not alluded to in the Autobiography^
but Dr. Bain assures us that " the contrast of his boyish
figure and thin voice with his immense conversational
power, left a deep impression on the undergraduates of
the time, notwithstanding their being familiar with
Macaulay and Austin." Indeed, Professor Townshend
was very anxious to get Mill entered at Trinity College,
Cambridge ; but it is equally doubtful whether the father
would have consented to this course, or whether the
son would have consented to subscribe to the Thirty-
Nine Articles. On the 21st of May 1823, however,
he was appointed junior clerk in the Examiner's Office
at the India House, which effectually precluded other
plans for his career.t
♦ Bain : /. S. Mill, p. 28.
t I subjoin some details as to Mill's employment in the India
House, taken from Bain's Life of Mill, The clerks in those days
had no salary, only a gratuity. For three years Mill had £y>
a-year ; at the end of that time he received a salary of ;f 100, with
an annual rise of £10, In 1828 he was put over the heads of all
the clerks, and made an Assistant at ;^6oo a-year, being sixth in
rank. In 1830 he stood fifth, his father being at the top. Early
in 1836 he gained a step, and on his father's death the same year.
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JOHN STUART MILL, 47
another. He was then third, but David Hill was made second over
his head, Peacock being chief. His salary was now ;f 1200 a-year,
to which, in 1854, a special and personal addition was made of
£,2100 a-year. On March 28, 1856, Peacock and Hill retired
together, and Mill was made Examiner, with a salary of £2000
a-year. At Christmas 1858, on the transfer of the Company's
government to the Crown, he was superannuated on a pension of
;f 1500 a-year.
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CHAPTER III.
CRISIS — (1823-1840).
THE interest attaching to Mill, not only as a thinker,
but as a man, is centred in the fifteen years
which succeeded his first Qjitry of the India
House. At the commencement of this period he is his
father's own son ; at the end of it he has written an
article on Bentham, which, by his early friends, was
looked upon as almost a n apostasy . Amongst the many
gifts of Mill's disposition, the greatest, perhaps, was a
rare candour and honesty of. mind, to which he owes his
own somewhat independent position in the ranks of the
school to which by inheritance and taste, he belonged.
In 1823 he might have been a dogmatist and a bigot ; he
seems to suggest, in his Autobiography, that such was
the case; but this was the inevitable intolerance of a
precocious youth. He speedily showed himself keenly
receptive of influences which came from quarters with
which his father could not sympathise, while at the same
time he had the moral courage to publish his changing
opinions to the world. It is easy, of course, for the
critic to point out some of the inconsistencies, begotten
of this change, which are to be observed in different
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JOHN STUART MILL, 49
parts of his work. It should be no less easy for a
biographer to admire that higher inconsistency which is
but the synonym of a mental growth — continuous,
conscientious, and in the best sense, progressive.
It is necessary to attempt to sketch the position of Mill
at the outset of his public career. Democrat, Empiricist, -
Benthamite, Utilitarian — ^such terms were, doubtless, the
current description of him in the mouth of his con-
temporaries. We can trace the various features of his
character in the successive mental influences which at
this time he underwent. In 1822 he first reads the
history of the French Revolution. He learns with
astonishment that the principles of democracy which
in 1822 were in so hopeless a minority everywhere in
Eiu-ope, had borne all before them in France some thirty
years earlier, and had been the creed of the nation.
From this time, he tells us, the subject took an immense
hold of his feelings. Under the careful training of his
father, he had learnt to sympathise with the democracy
in Grecian history, and with the struggles of plebeians
against the patricians in the annals of Rome ; but here,
close to his own era, he found a triumphant vindication
of those very principles with which he felt himself allied.
The result was a careful study of the French Revolution,
and a design to write something on the subject. The
literary harvest was not, however, reaped by Mill himself,
but by Carlyle, into whose hands Mill seems to have
placed a considerable mass of materials. But Mill's own
aspirations were now fixed. "What had happened so
lately seemed as if it might easily happen again; and "^
the most transcendent glory I was capable of conceiving
was that of figuring, successful or unsuccessful, as a
4
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50 LIFE OF
Girondist in an English Convention." The democratic
champion was now in the field.
The same year is the real commencement of his
philosophic studies. The choice of works bears the
unmistakable imprint of the father's guidance. Locke's
Essay on the Human Understanding is succeeded by
Helvetius' de P Esprit, and Hartley's Observations on Man
is read side by side with James Mill's Analysis of the
Mindy which at this time is on the stocks. These
works are all on that side of philosophic thought which
is called Empirical, and contain the main principles of
the ipductive and experiential scheme. There are no
such things as innate ideas ; the mind of man before
experience comes is a tabula rasa, a blank and character-
less piece of paper. How, then, do the successive and
firagmentary experiences which come in upon us,' through
the medium of the senses, crystallise into those abiding
thoughts and ideas which we term knowledge? By
means of the great mental law of Association, which
helps us at once to remember and to reason. Intuition,
innate conceptions, a native and h priori reason — all
these are meaningless terms. There is no innate sense
of Duty, or innate idea of God. But such data have
been slowly acquired by successive infiltration of ex-
perience, and made compact and solid by means of
f Association. To these principles Mill swore allegiance,
and to most of them he remained constant throughout
his philosophic career. The method of study was
twofold. In private there was the composition of careful
abstracts taken fi-om each chapter as he read ; in public
there was discussion carried on among fi*iends, either
at the house of Bentham or of Grote. The Utilitarian
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JOHN STUART MILL. 5 1
Society and the Speculative Debating Society were both
set on foot at this period, the first in 1823, the second in
1825.
The Utilitarian Society introduces us to a third great 4;;—
influence, perhaps the greatest which Mill recognised, the
influence of Bentham. The name itself was a happy
piece of nomenclature, which Mill borrowed not from a
friend, but an enemy. In one of Gait's novels, T?ie
Annals of the Parish^ a Scotch clergyman, of which the
book purports to be an autobiography, warns his
parishioners not to leave the Gospel and become Utili-
tarians. With a boy's fondness for a name and a banner.
Mill tells us, he seized on the word, and for some years
called himself and others by it as a sectarian application.
But the idea which the term was meant to convey was
entirely due to Bentham. When Mill was reading Law
with Austin his father put in his hands Dumont's Traiit
de Legislation^ which interpreted Bentham's principal spec-
ulations to the Continent. The effect is best described
in Mill's own words.* " The reading of this book was an
epoch in my life ; one of the turning points in my mental
history. My previous education had been, in a certain
sense, already a course of Benthamism. The Benthamic
standard of *the greatest happiness' was that which I
had always been taught to apply — yet in the first pages of
Bentham it biurst upon me with all the force of novelty.
What thus impressed me was the chapter in which
Bentham passed judgment on the common modes of
reasoning in morals and legislation, deduced from phrases
like 'law of nature,' * right reason,' *the moral sense,'
* natural rectitude,' and the like ; and characterised them
* Autobiography y pp. 64-67,
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52 LIFE OF
as dogmatism in disguise, imposing its sentiments upon
others under cover of sounding expressions which convey
no reason for the sentiment, but set up the sentiment as
its own reason. It had not struck me before that
Bentham's principle put an end to all this. The feeling
rushed upon me that all previous moralists were super-
seded, and that here, indeed, was the commencement of
a new era in thought. The impression was strengthened
by the manner in which Bentham put into scientific form
the application of the happiness principle to the morality
of actions, by analysing the various classes and orders
of their consequences. . . . When I laid down the last
volume of the Traiik^ I had become a different being.
The 'principle of utility,' understood as Bentham
understood it, and applied in the manner in which he
applied it through these three volumes, fell exactly into
its place as the keystone which held together the
detached and fragmentary component parts of my know-
ledge and beliefs. It gave unity to my conceptions of
things. I now had opinions; a creed, a doctrine, a
philosophy ; in one among the best senses of the word,
a religion ; the inculcation and diffusion of which could
be made the principal outward purpose of a life." There
is no lack here of generous enthusiasm. Nineteen years
later we shall find him almost equally enthusiastic on the
subject of Comte's Philosophic Positive,
Mill himself attributes a very large effect to another
influence, which is only so far of interest as it seems
to throw light either by way of contrast or similarity
on his posthumous essays on Religion. He read, at
the suggestion of the elder Mill, a book which was
avowedly written on the lines of Bentham, entitled The
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JOHN STUART MILL, 53
Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness
of Mankind^ bearing on its title-page the pseudonym of
Philip Beauchamp. It was a discussion of the useful-
ness of religion rather than of its truth, an inquiry into
the eflfects of belief on the general character and thoughts
of mankind at large, without particular reference to any
special form of belief except that which might be included
under the head of Natural Religion. The conclusion
aimed at was an exposure of the hoUowness of such
Deism as depended on ideas like the course of Pro-
vidence in history and the physical world. The result
on Mill's mind was simply the deepening of what in the
fashionable language of the present day would be called
his Agnosticism. It was not merely that any form of
revealed Religion failed to satisfy him, but that he^
acquired a conviction that no religion could be founded '
on wh aLj yas vagu ely termed the teaching of Nature.
Some of the elements of so negativist a creed apparently
did not appeal to him in later years, for the tone of his
last essay on Religion was, as we know, a surprise, and
almost a painful surprise, to his friends.
With such influences as we have detailed acting on his
mind, and with all the advantages of having as his
friends Grote and Austin, to say nothing of a man with
so assured a reputation as his father now enjoyed, the
young Mill was launched into London society as the
champion of the new and philosophical Radicalism. He
is known as a trenchant writer in literary organs of
advanced thought ; he is almost the principal contributor
to the new Westminster Review^ which was started in
declared opposition both to the Quarterly and the
Edinburgh ; above all, he is the founder and upholder
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54 LIFE OF
of societies which aim at the regeneration of the social
fabric by means of Malthus's population principle and
Bentham's greatest happiness of the greatest number.
He is the inspiring spirit of the Utilitarian Society and
the Speculative Debating Society ; while in moments of
leisure he reads and discusses prominent philosophical
works with his friends, and in moments of occupation
attends to the complicated business of the India House.
Such a young man we can readily imagine to figure as a
logical reformer among his associates, and as a revolu-
tionary firebrand among his opponents. Nor is it hard
to estimate the general character of the youthful band
which surrounded him, either as personal friends or
as satellites. Anyone who has had any personal
experience of academic debating societies, or of youthful
clubs for the propagation of advanced opinion, can
readily produce in imagination the features of these
reunions. It may be true that middle-aged men are
cynics; it is abundantly true that young men are
doctrinaires. All the good side of adolescent energy
goes to the production of such societies — its warmth of
feeling, its confident logic, its boundless self-reliance,
together with that serene indifference as to the relation
of extreme theory to ordinary practice which constitutes
at once the charm and the prodigal wastefulness of
juvenile speculation. We can imagine the perfervid zeal
of Charles Austin, on whose shoulders even Mill places
the blame for such poor estimate as Benthamism enjoyed
in the world ; and we can sympathise with, though Mill
invites us to smile at, that determination to ouirer
whatever was by anyone considered ofifensive in philo-
sophical radicalism, which was the badge and emblem of
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JOHN STUART MILL. 55
the members of the coterie. Meanwhile there was
abundant cleverness in the ranks, though perhaps not so
much identity of principles as the world gave them credit
for. But it was not long before Mill discovered that
sectarianism was foolish. Indeed, he records the usual
fate of such societies when he remarks of the one which
he championed, that all who had anything in them
quickly outgrew their boyish vanity, and those who had
not, became tired of differing from other people, and
gave up alike the good and the bad of the heterodox
opinions they had professed.*
Carlyle spoke of Mill to Caroline Fox with that
magisterial scorn mixed with shrewd penetrative insight
which he generally employed in his judgments : " Ah,
poor fellow! he has had to get himself out of
Benthamism; and all the emotions and sufferings he
has endured have helped him to thoughts that never
entered Bentham's head. However," he continues, " he
is still too fond of demonstrating everything. If John
Mill were to get up to heaven, he would be hardly
content till he had made out how it all was. For my
part, I don't much trouble myself about the machinery
of the place ; whether there is an operative set of angels,
or an industrial class, I'm willing to leave all that."t This
was a far better criticism than a previous judgment of
Carlyle, when he exclaimed, on reading some of Mill's
earlier writings, ** Here is a new mystic ! " For it serves
to illustrate from the outside those touching self-
revelations which Mill has put in the fifth chapter of his
Autobiography. What Mill calls ** a crisis in my mental
* Autobiography^ p. 79,
t Journals of Caroline FoXy i. 309.
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56 UFE OF
history" began in 1826. The year before, when he was
only nineteen, had been passed in remarkably laborious
industry. His principal occupation had been the editing
of Bentham's book on Evidence. His subsidiary work,
quite apart from his official duties as clerk, runs as
follows '.—Parliamentary History and Review started.
Writes the following articles — on Catholic Disabilities,
on the Commercial Crisis, on Currency, and on the Reci-
procity Principle in Commerce. Learns German. Begins
morning readings in the Utilitariari Society at Grote's
house in Threadneedle Street Goes with some others
to the debates of the Owenites' Co-operative Society.
Founding of the Speculative Debating Society. Writes
in the Westminster on the Political Economy of the
Quarterly^ on the Law of Libel (?), and on the Game
Laws (?) [number for January 1826]. Here was a list
which was enough to tax even so untiring a brain as
Mill's. Yet, perhaps, it is a prosaic opinion to attribute
the mental crisis, as Dr. Bain does, principally to
physical causes and to the overworking of the brain.
Mill treats his malady almost entirely on the subjective
side,,and that he passed through some kind of a spiritual
crisis can hardly be doubted by anyone who studies its
sequel in the altered tone of his later writings. Carlyle
was undoubtedly rights he had to get himself out of Ben-
thamism ; and the process was rendered doubly difficult
and painful owing to the respect and admiration he
entertained for the Benthamism of his father. When
the light of newer thoughts breaks upon cherished
opinions, a mental tragedy, which is by no means the
less real because it is subdued, makes havoc of a man's
peace and self-control.
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JOHf^ STUART MILL. 57
Mill's own graphic account of himself at this period
has often been quoted, but will bear quoting again as
a most interesting piece of psychological analysis : — "I
was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is
occasionally liable to, unsusceptible to enjoyment or
pleasurable excitement : one of those moods when
what is pleasure at other times becomes insipid or
indifferent; the state I should think in which converts
to Methodism usually are when smitten by their first
* conviction of sin.' In this frame of mind it occurred
to me to put the question directly to myself : —
'Suppose that all your objects in life were realised,
that all the changes in institutions and opinions
which you are looking forward to could be completely
effected at this very instant, would this be a great
joy and happiness to you?' And an irrepressible
self-consciousness distinctly answered, *No!' At this
my heart sank within; the whole foundation on which
my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness
was to have been found in the continual pursuit of
this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how
could there ever again be any interest in the means ? I
seemed to have nothing left to live for."
This is the shipwreck of Rationalism, at least of that
narrow and poverty-stricken Rationalism which, was the
boast of the eighteenth century. The end of life, both
for the individual and for the community, is happiness.
Everything, whether health; or money, or virtue itself,
exists as a means to this sovereign end. The office of
reason, then, is to adapt these means, to work them out
by chains of calculation and argument, to make them
fall into their proper subordination and value, as viewed
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58 LIFE OP
in the light of this universal end But happiness is the
gift of emotional, expansive characters, and not of cal-
culating machines ; to aim at happiness in every act or
project is, as common experience shows, the very way
to lose it. A man is not a logical engine; he is a
complex of feeling and reason, and the emotional
elements within him will not be mulcted of their rights.
Dwarf the feelings, starve the artistic instincts, eradicate
the moral sentiment, and the result will be a jiarren
sacrifice, a suicidal victory, which is only fortunate when
it does not mean an anarchic revolt The teaching of
the older Mill had been throughout the suppression
of feeling ; the watchword of the Utilitarian Society had
'been the continual outcry against innate sentiment
Bentham had not hesitated to malign all poetry as
misrepresentation, and vindicate the claim of pushpin
as a quantitative equivalent to Milton and Shakespeare ;
and the issue is seen in John Mill sitting down in
despair, with all his schemes of life and human regener-
ation lying in ruins around him.
Such a crisis is not wholly uncommon, but its issues
will differ with different men. In one man's case it will
lead to the resignation of earlier ideals, as when Plato,
after writing the Republic^ is led by his actual experiences
in Sicily to write The Laws, In the case of another
man, it will issue in an unwocthy cynicism, as when
Tourgu^nef, after his dream in Phres et Fits had gained
a realisation in the emancipation of the serfs in i860, sat
down to write those sallies of a disappointed idealist
which we find in Fumie in 1868. Rarely enough do we
find the crisis issuing in an_ enlargement o f vieWy asjy as
the case with Mill. There can be no doubt how the
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JOHN STUART MILL, 59
lai^er lessons w^re first brought home to his mind. In
the Speculative Debating Society he had come across
Frederick Maurice and John Sterling, and the new
. impression seems to have effaced the influence of
Charles Austin. Here were men who had themselves
a Radicalism of their own, but it was not the Radicalism
of Bentham. What was the secret of thfeir lives ? How
had they preserved their souls alive amid the arid fields
of utility and selfishness ? By what course of study or
sympathetic communing with alien minds had they
refused to bow the knee to the greatest happiness
principle ? And the answer seemed clear. They would
'. have nothing to say to sectarianism ; they thought self-
culture a duty, and they read Wordsworth and Coleriflge. ^
They were not fond of analytic habits, they were *
sceptical of the enormous value of Hartley's Association
principle, and t hey did not believe that happiness was
the^_^SDle— end. " Analytic habits," says Mill, with
plaintive emphasis, "are a perpetual worm at the root
both of the passions and of the virtues." It was a
notable discovery, for it. cast some doubt on his own and
his father's metaphysics, and suggested that we must take
happiness by the way, by pursuing some given end
without reference to this so-called universal standard.
And so Mill, in the autumn of 1828, begins for the first
time to read Wordsworth, and turns his thoughts in the
direction of Carlyle, Goethe, and Coleridge. «
The articles which Mill wrote in the ensuing years
are the best evidence of the reality of his change. As
is the case with all cautious men, the change worked
slowly. But it was unmistakable to his friends. When
Mill became editor of the London Review^ Mrs. Grote
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wrote to Roebuck (April 1837) — "I am quite persuaded
the Review will cease to be the engine of propagating
sound and sane doctrines on Ethics and Politics under
J. M. Whether, by getting hooks baited with carrion,
he attracts other sorts of fish than those we angle for,
and thus render it a better investment, I really am not in
a condition to judge. But, on the other hand, it is a
matter of entire indifference to me so viewed. For my
part, I only wonder how the people contrive to keep
improving under the purveyance of the stuff and
nonsense they are subjected to."* Mrs. Grote is, no
doubt, unnecessarily venomous here, but Dr. Bain
admits that there was, for some time, an alienation
between Mill and his old friends. Mill was still a
reformer and an Utilitarian, but he wore his rue with a
difference. The chief points in his change of attitude
we have now to see.
Characteristic materials are to be found in some of the
essays which were deemed worthy of being preserved
in the Dissertations and Discussions — especially the
articles on Bentham and Coleridge contributed to The
London and Westminster^ 'Thoughts on Poetry,' and
* Alfred de Vigny,' the first of which was published in
the Monthly Repository^ the second in The London and
Westminster^ and the paper on De Tocqueville, by means
of which Mill made his dtbut in the pages of the once
hotly-attacked Edinburgh'. It was the Bentham article
which seems to have given offence, for it revealed an
attitude towards the oracle which was rather that of the
critic than of the disciple. Such sentences as the
following, for instance, were not calculated to propitiate
♦ Quoted by Bain. /. S, Mill, p. 56, note.
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JOHN STUART MILL. 6i
his friends : — " Bentham's lot was cast in a generation of
the leanest and barrenest men whom England has as yet
produced, and he was an old man when a better race
came in with the present century." ** He saw in man
little but what the vulgarest eye can see ; recognised" no ^
diversities of character but such as he who runs may
read." "No one, probably, who in an instructed age
ever attempted to give a rule to all human conduct, set
out with a more limited conception either of the agencies
by which human conduct w, or of those by which it
should be, influenced."* If the merit of Bentham is that
he was the father of innovation, the great subversive and
critical thinker of his age, and the founder of a method
which has many of the best elements of inductive
science, his defects are equally obvious and striking. He
failed principally in that he was unable to derive light
fro m other mi nds; and the inability was irendered the
more striking owing to the singular incompleteness of his
own mind. The two defects hang together, for the power
of learning from others is due to an assimilative faculty,
be it sympathy, or imagination, in which Bentham was
curiously deficient The result is that his picture of
humanity, like that drawn by an earlier thinker with
whom he has some affinity, Thomas Hobbes, is wanting
in some of the chief elements which are characteristic of
the species. To describe a man as a being moved by selt\
love, and susceptible only of the stings of pain or pleasure, ^,
is to leave out all the higher motives, to narrow down /
sympathy to its simplest and barest form, and to translate
disinterestedness into the calculating desire for general
happiness. All, therefore, that Bentham's philosophy
* Mill : DissertaHons and Discussions^ voL i., p. 355, etc
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62 LIFE OF
can do for the individual is to prescribe some of the
more obvious dictates of prudence, or outward probity, or
beneficence. It can not help him in what Mill had now
discovered to be one of the chief agencies, not only of
personal happiness, but of success in the highest sense
of the word ; it^ can not help him in the formation of his
own character; it can suggest no consistent mode of
self-culture. Nor can it do much more for society at
large. It can, indeed, teach the means of organising and
regulating the merely business part of the social arrange-
ments ; and, hence, we can understand Bentham's success
in the reform of Law. But national character, its import-
ance, and the width of its range, the key it furnishes for
the solution of historical problems, and the necessity for
its recognition by the political reformer — all this is for it
a sealed book, owing to the poverty of its psychological
and historical groundwork. Is his theory of Government
more successful? According to Bentham, government
is the authority of the numerical majority ; to give more
political power to the majority is the essence of so-called
Radicalism, whether professed by Bentham himself, or
illustrated in James Mill's essay on Government But
there are limits to the authority of the majority. It
should always respect the personal liberty of the
individual, and it should always show deference to the
superiority of cultivated intelligence. To Mill, at all
events, these were cardinal maxims, enforced in his
later years, not only by his essay on Liberty, but also
by his efforts in Parliament to secure some sort of
representation for minorities. Perhaps, too, with respect
to the utility principle, Bentham was yrrong in empha-
sising it out of all regard to those secondary principles
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JOHN STUART MILL. 63
and ends which move the greater portion of mankind. It
might, indeed, be urged that this only proved an excess
of logical and rational principle, without which there
could be no rational philosophy. Yet it must also be
admitted that there are other modes of regarding actions
than their purely moral aspect. There is the aesthetic
aspect, for example, which finds such abundant illustra-
tion in the creations of art — in music, in poetry, in
the drama. On this side, Bentham's limitations are ^-
notorious. Nor could he see how the artistic and
emotional instincts enter even into the sphere of morals.
" His ignorance of the deeper springs of human
character prevented him (as it prevents most English-
men) from suspecting how profoundly such things enter
into the moral nature of man, and into the education both
of the individual and of the race."* If Mill could utter
such criticisms, we can understand the humaner, if less
consistent, version which he propounded some years
later, of the doctrines of Utilitarianism. This discovery
of Bentham's limitations in the aesthetic department was
closely connected with Mill's newer studies in poetry.
In the midst of his own desolation, when he found that
life contained for him no objects to live for. Mill turned,
as he tells us, to Wordsworth, and found in his poems a
real medicine for his mind. The reason was that these
poems expressed states of feeling, and of thought coloured
by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They
seemed to be the very culture of the feelings of which he
was in quest. It was true that Wordsworth, compared
with the greatest poets, " might be said to be the poet of
unpoetical natures, possessed of quiet and contemplative
* Dissertations and Discussions ^ vol. i., p. 389.
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64 UFE OF
tastes. But unpoetical natures are precisely those which
require poetic cultivation ; and this cultivation Words-
worth is much more fitted to give than poets who are
intrinsically far more poets than he." From Wordsworth
Mill went on to Shelley, and, struggling as he was against
a nature essentially logical, he was able to appreciate a
nature which was so diametrically opposed to his own.
Indeed, in his Thoughts on Poetry^ he even exaggerates
the importance of the emotional element as entering more
-exclusively into the character of the true poet than the
intellectual. The highest form of poetry appeared to him
to be the lyrical, where the musing of the poet is not so
much heard as overheard. He draws a distinction between
the poet of culture, like Wordsworth, and the poet of
emotion, like Shelley ; and, carried to the farthest point
by the reaction against his previous forms of thought,
he estimates Shelley as much the finer poet of the two.
" The state of [poetic] feeling may be either of soul or
of sense, or oftener (might we not say invariably ?) of
both; for the poetic temperament is usually, perhaps
always, accompanied by exquisite senses. Whatever of
sensation enters into the feeling must not be local or
consciously organic ; it is a condition of the whole frame,
not of a part only. States of feeling, whether sensuous
or spiritual, which thus possess the whole being, are the
fountains of that which we have called the poetry of
poets.'** Poetry is found to emanate from a mental and
physical constitution, peculiar, not in the kind, but in
the degree of its susceptibility; a constitution which
makes its possessor capable of greater happiness than
mankind in general, and also of greater unhappiness;
* Dissertations and Discussions^ vol. i., p. 87.
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JOHN STUART MILL. 65
and, because greater, so also more various. "Such
poetry, to all who know enough of nature to own it as
being in nature, is much more poetry, is poetry in a far
higher sense than any other." Assuredly such senti-
ments as these are far enough removed from the
Benthamic stand-point. Nor will Mill refuse to adopt
as his own the views which Alfred de Vigny puts in the
mouth of his hero, Stello. If asked why he felt himself
to be a poet, the answer he gives is one which Mill is
prepared to endorse — " Because there is in nature no .
beauty, nor grandeur, nor harmony, which does not
cause in me a prophetic thrill — which does not fill me
with a deep emotion, and swell my eyelids with tears
divine and inexplicable. Because of the infinite pity I
feel for mankind, my companions in suffering, and the
eager desire I feel to hold out my hand to them and
raise them incessantly by words of commiseration and of
love."* It was by sympathy with such emotional ardours
as these that Mill's own nature was becoming exalted
and enlarged.
We can now understand why Mill could feel an
interest even in the reactionary and conservative
elements to be found in Coleridge. Nothing is more
remarkable in Mill than his sudden awakening to the
fact that there must be a party of order as well as a
party of progress. Theoretically, he discovered that the
line of advance iii history was spiral rather than recti-
lineal ; in practice he from this time was fond of main-
taining that the truth lay somewhere between the views
of two counterbalancing and antagonistic parties. The
French philosophes had made a great error in thinking that
* Dissertations and Discussions, vol. i., p. 323.
5
/--
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66 LIFE OF
they could make a clean sweep of society and of the
Church. The historical and philosophic views of Coleridge
and the Germans were much truer. For the stability of
^ society depends not only on a large system of national
education, but also on a feeling of allegiance or loyalty
to some principle or set of principles. A necessary con-
dition is that there must be something which is settled,
and not to be called in question. " Grote never ceased
to convert this remark into an expression for the standing
intolerance of society towards unpopular opinions," says
Bain ;* a comment which shows clearly enough how far
Mill had drifted from his old anchorage. But Sectar-
ianism in its narrower forms was henceforth impossible
for Mill "J'ai trouv^ que la plupart des sectes ont
raison dans une bonne partie de ce qu'elles avancent,
mais non pas tant en ce qu'elles nient."t The more he
studied Continental thought, the more he was disposed
to qualify that absolute value of Democracy for which
his father contended. This comes out very clearly in
his essay on De Tocqueville's Democracy in America,
There is such a thing as a tyranny of the majority, and
manhood suffrage might conceivably fasten its fetters
more closely. There ought to be a learned class, there
ought to be even a leisured class. " The sure, and now
no longer slow, advance by which the classes hitherto in
the ascendant are merging into the common mass, and
all other forces giving way before the power of mere
numbers, is well calculated to inspire uneasiness even in
* Bain : /. S. Mill, p. 57.
+ Dissertations and Discussions ^ i., 458. '* I have found that
most sects are right in a good part of what they advance, but not so
right in what they deny."
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JOHN STUART MILL. 67
those to whom democracy/^ se presents nothing alarm-
ing. It is not the uncontrolled ascendency of popular
power, but of any power, which is formidable. There is
no one power in society, or capable of being constituted
in it, of which the influences do not become mischievous
as soon as it reigns uncontrolled — as soon as it becomes
exempted from any necessity of being in the right by
being able to make its mere will prevail without the con-
dition of a previous struggle. To render its ascendency ^
safe, it must be fitted with correctives and counteractives,
possessing the qualities opposite to its characteristic
<iefects.* The general result of these considerations on
Mill's political theories may be seen partly in the sixth
book of his Logic^ partly in the pages in the Autobiography ^
where he sums up his newer stand-point. In the Logic
he has much to say on the proper method of political
science. It must not be empirical, as though its subject-
matter was like the data with which Chemistry deals,t
nor yet geometrical, or abstract, as though it could all be
deduced from some general principle, such as the utility
principle of Bentham. But it must be either deductive
like the method of physical science in its discovery of
causes, or deductive in the sense in which Comte pro-
pounded his historical method in the Fhilosqphie Positive,
In the Autobiography he speaks of the influence on
himself of the St. Simonians, Bazard and Enfantin, and
discovers that their criticisms on the common doctrines
of Liberahsm are full of important truth. He was,
* Dissertations and Discussions^ vol. ii.', p. 80.
t Macaulay's attack on his father's "Government** article,
declared that the only method of Political Science was experimental
and inductive.
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68 UFE OF JOHN STUART MILL,
indeed, still a Radical and a Democrat for Europe, and
especially for England. What he altered was the premises
of his political philosophy. He learnt to look upon the
device of political institutions as a moral and educational
question more than one of material interests. He ceased
to consider representative democracy as an absolute
principle ; and took the truer view that it was a question
of time, place, and circumstance. But, on one point, he
went further than the Liberals and Democrats of his age.
In 1 83 1 Mill was first introduced to Mrs. Taylor. Per-
haps it is not fanciful to trace to this acquaintance the
commencement or, at anyrate, the deepening of his con-
victions as to the justice of Female Suflfrage, and the
absolute equality of men and women. Speaking of the
St Simonians, he says, ^' I honoured them most of all for
what they have been most cried down for — ^the boldness
and freedom from prejudice with which they treated the
subject of family, the most important of any, and needing
more fundamental alterations than remain to be made in
any other great social institution, but on which scarcely
any reformer has the courage to touch. In proclaiming
the perfect equality of men and women, and an entirely
new order of things in regard to their relations with
one another, the St Simonians, in conmion with Owen
and Fourier, have entitled themselves to the grateful
remembrance of future generations."*
* Autobiography ^ pp. 167, 168.
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CHAPTER IV.
"a system of logic" — ( 1 840-1 843).
THE ten years between 1830 and 1840 were for
Mill full of numerous incidents and toils. A visit
to Paris after the Revolution of July in 1830
renewed his keen interest in French politics, and made
him for several years a diligent student of French affairs.
Of his writings from 1832 to 1834 he made the remark,
that even if the newspaper articles were left out, they
would make a large volume. His father's death in 1 836
was succeeded by an illness, which caused a three
months' absence in Switzerland and Italy. Another
illness followed in 1839, and a second and a longer
absence of six months in Italy. He recovered slowly
from both attacks, but the first, which seems to have
been an affection of the brain, left its mark on him in an
almost ceaseless twitching over one eye. The main
work, however, for which he was slowly preparing him-
self during these years, was The System of LogUy which
was not published till 1843. The first foundation was,
perhaps, laid in the readings on logical subjects, which
took place in Grote's house when he was twenty-one
years of age. At the same date he composed an article
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70 LIFE OF
on Whateley's Logic^ which was published in the West-
minster Review, Then, in 1830, we find him putting on
paper some ideas on Logical Distinctions among Terms,
and the import of Propositions, followed in 1831 by a
consideration of Logical Axioms and the Theory of the
Syllogism. A long interval ensues, in which he is
grappling with the problems of Induction, and the pro-
cedure of Science, which are to occupy the third book of
his Logic^ and of which he seems to have made a rough
draft in 1838. Further problems, dealing with Sociology
and the Logic of the Moral Sciences, are discussed and
solved in 1840, when the work is temporarily completed
by what afterwards is called the sixth book.
It was in 1840 that his brother Henry was dying of
consumption at Falmouth, nursed by Mrs. Mill and her
two daughters, Harriet and Clara ; and on March i6th he
was visited by John, who stayed with him till his death
on April 4th. It was at Falmouth that Miss Caroline
Fox first made the acquaintance with Mill which she
has so charmingly related in \itx Journals,* As we have
here several noticeable passages of description, we may
well linger for a little over her sympathetic pages,
especially as fortune had thrown her in the way of many
of the eminent men of her time, and thus furnished her
with a standard of judgment admirably acute and valu-
able. The way is prepared for her reception of Mill by
an enthusiastic account of him by John Sterling, who
was one of the firmest friends of the Fox family. Nor is
she disappointed when she sees him. Hje is a very
uncommon-looking person, she remarks ; such acuteness
and sensibility marked in his exquisitely chiselled
* Journals of Caroline Fox, Edited by Horace N. Pym. 2 vols.
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JOHN STUART MILL. 7 1
countenance, more resembling a portrait of Lavater than
any other that she remembers. His voice is refinement
itself, and his mode of expressing himself tallies with
voice and countenance. She also notices his " wonder-
fully keen, quiet eyes." With this we may compare a
somewhat cooler picture drawn of him by Dr. Bain^
when he saw him at the India House two years later, in
1842. "The day after arriving (in London), I walked
down to the India House, and realised my dream of
meeting Mill in person. I am not likely to forget the
impression which he made upon me as he stood by his
desk, with his face turned to the door as we entered. His
tall, slim figure, his youthful face and bald head, fair hair
and ruddy complexion, and the twitching of his eyebrow
when he spoke, first arrested the attention; then the
vivacity of his manner, his thin voice approaching to
sharpness, but with nothing shrill or painful about it, his
comely features and sweet expression, would have all
remained in my memory, though I had never seen him
again. To complete the picture, I should add his dress^
which was constant, a black dress-suit, with silk necktie.
Many years after that he changed his dress-coat for a
surtout ; but black cloth was his choice to the end."*
That he had made a pleasant impression on the little
Falmouth circle Mill was quite aware, for he was the
recipient of many acts of kindness; but he made a
characteristic remark in a letter to Caroline's brother,
R. Barclay Fox — " You have not, nor have even those of
your family^ whom I have been so fortunate as to see
more of, as yet seen me^ as I really and naturally am,
but a me artificially made, self-conscious, egotistical, and
* Bain : /. S. Mill, p. 64.
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72 UFE OF
noisily demonstratiTe, by havirg much feeling to show,
and ver)' little time to show it in." Perhaps MiU, like so
many other men of talent, was deficient in (and deplored
the deficiency of) the winning gift of naturalness.
There are many points of interest brought out in
Caroline Yond^ Journals. Not the least interesting is the
light thrown on the friendship between Mill and John
Sterling. Sterling was himself the intimate friend of
Coleridge, Maurice, and others who, like Dr. Calvert
(to whom there are many allusions in the Journals)^
represented a very different side of thought and life from
that with which Mill was in early years familiar. The
first acquaintance is alluded to, — a hard fight at the
Debating Society at Cambridge, when Mill appeared as
a Benthamite and Sterling as a Mystic ; since that time
the two antagonists approximated to one another more
and more. It is not difficult to understand in what way
they supplemented each the other's gifts and defects.
To Sterling, Mill appeared "the most scientific thinker
extant, more than Coleridge was, more continuous and
severe ; " on the other hand, he was deficient in the range
of poetical feeling, because he had " singularly little sense
of the concrete." To Mill, on the contrary. Sterling was
the man who had taught him to read Wordsworth, and
who had first suggested to him the necessity of a
culture of the emotions. He is, therefore, pleased to
make Sterling and the Fox family known to each other,
because he is sure they will be full of mutual appreciation :
and Miss Caroline Fox adds, " he talked enthusiastically
about him.*' Nor is the change which is going on within
Mill unknown to his sympathetic critics at Falmouth.
** No one," said Mill to Miss Fox, " should attempt
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JOHN STUART MILL. ^ 73
anything intended to benefit his age without at first
making a stern resolution to take up his cross and to
bear it. If he does not begin by counting the cost, all
his schemes must end in disappointment ; either he will
sink under it as Chatterton, or yield to the counter-
current like Erasmus, or pass his life in disappointment
and vexation as Luther did." Miss Fox quite understood
that these words contained a personal allusion. It was
evidently a process through which the speaker himself
had passed, as was sufficiently attested by his care-
worn and anxious, though most beautiful and refined,
countenance. Sterling supplies the explanation. He/^
had been trained by his father in the strictest sect of
Bentham, and was slowly emancipating himself by
turning to Wordsworth and Coleridge. Sterling spoke
of the gradual development which he had watched
in him. "He has made the sacrifice of being the ^
undoubted leader of a powerful party for the higher ^
glory of being a private in the army of Truth, ready to
storm any of the strong places of Falsehood, even if
defended by his late adherents. He was brought up ''
in the belief that politics and social institutions were
everything, but he has been gradually delivered from
this outwardness, and feels now clearly that individual
reform must be the groundwork of social progress."
Caroline Fox learns the same facts in a negative
fashion from the lips of Dr. Bowring, Bentham's literary
executor. In a visit which Bowring paid to Falmouth,
on August 7tb, 1840, he spoke of Mill "with evident
contempt as a renegade from philosophy, Anglich^ a
renouncer of Bentham's creed and an expounder of
Coleridge's. S. T. Coleridge's mysticism Dr. Bowring
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74 LIFE OF
never could understand, and characterises much of his
teaching as a great flow of empty eloquence, to which
no meaning was attachable. Mill's newly-developed
'Imagination' puzzles him not a little; he was most
emphatically a philosopher, but then he read Words-
worth, and that muddled him, and he has been in a
strange confusion ever since, endeavouring to unite
poetry and philosophy."
Indeed, many softer touches appear in Mill's char-
acter, as seen by the kindly glance of Caroline Fox and
her Falmouth friends. Death, the great leveller, had
brought the philosophic and the religious mind into
nearer relationship, and Henry's last hours inspired
many new and strange interests. It is a new thing, said
Sterling, for John Mill to sympathise with religious
characters, for some years ago his father had made him
quite a bigot against religion. And there is a pleasant
picture of Dr. Calvert and John Mill standing one on
one side, the other on the other of Henry's death-bed.
Dr. Calvert remarked, " This sort of scene puts an end
to Reason, and Faith begins;" the other emphatically
answered "Yes," and a conversation ensued "which
displayed much humility and deep feeling." The fol-
lowing sentences from a letter which Mill wrote to
Barclay Fox are not the language we might have
expected from the man who was regarded as one of the
sceptics of his age. " I know not how dangerous may
be the ground on which I am treading — but surely
a more Christian-like interpretation of the mystery of the
Atonement is that which, believing that divine wisdom
punishes the sinner for the sinner's sake, and not from
an inherent necessity more heathen than the heathen
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JOHN STUART MILL. 75
Nemesis, holds, as Coleridge did, that the sufferings of
the Redeemer were (in accordance with the eternal laws
on which this system of things is built) an indispensable
means of bringing about that change in the hearts of
sinners, the want of which is the real and sole hindrance
to the universal salvation of mankind." Perhaps, too,
no apology is needed for reproducing in a foot-note the
Calendar of Odours which Mill made for Caroline Fox.
We are so soon to regard Mill in the colder aspect of
logician, that we may be pardoned for lingering on that
sunnier aspect which he wore for his young Quaker
friend.* Mill was throughout his life an enthusiastic
botanist; and three days before his death he walked
fifteen miles on a botanical excursion.
Meanwhile, during all these years, despite his literary
labours as editor of the London Review (of which Sir W.
Molesworth was proprietor), despite his two illnesses,
* ** A Calendar of Odours, being an imitation of the various
Calendars of Flora by Linnaeus and others.
** The brilliant colouring of Nature is prolonged with incessant
changes from March till October ; but the fragrance of her breath
is spent before the summer is half ended. From March to July an
uninterrupted succession of sweet odours fills the air by day, and still
more by night ; but the gentler perfumes of autumn, like many of
the earlier ones here for that reason omitted, must be sought ere
they can be found. The Calendar of Odours, therefore, begins with
the laurel and ends with the lime.
^^ March, — Common laurel.
^^ April — Violets, furze, wall-flower, common broad-leaved willow,
apple-blossom.
"^«y.— Lilac, night-flowering stocks and rockets, laburnum,
hawthorn, seringa, sweet-briar.
•*y««tf— Mignonette, bean-fields, the whole tribe of summer roses»
hay, Portugal laurel, various species of pinks.
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76 LIFE OF
and his increasing work as he rose in the employ of the
India House, the Logic was growing apace. Dr. Bain
helped him with instances of induction in the third book,
and Auguste Comte, the founder of the Positivist school,
exercised no little influence over his mind in his con-
ception of Sociology in the sixth book. In the Auto-
biography he tells us that he was long depressed by the
old-world problems of Liberty and Necessity, till he found
the solution in a stricter definition of what is meant by
Determinism, and expounded it in his Logic, He
also consulted various German books on Logic, though,
indeed, they do not seem to have left much impress
on his mind. " Here is Sterling," he says in a letter to
Barclay Fox, "persuading me that I must read all
manner of German logic, which, though it goes much
against the grain with me, I can in no sort gainsay."
He is going to give the book to his Cornish friends, but
he warns them that they will find it more intelligible than
interesting. He forbids them to read it through, except
some chapters which he will point out. " It would be
like my reading a book on mining because you live in
Cornwall — it would be making friendship a burden ! "
The chapters he singled out were the fifth book on
Fallacies, and the chapter in the sixth book on Liberty
and Necessity, " which is short, and in my judgment the
^^July, — Common acacia, meadow-sweet, honeysuckle, sweet gale
or double myrtle, Spanish broom, lime.
*'In latest autumn, one stray odour, forgotten by its companions,
follows at a modest distance, — the creeping clematis which adorns
the cottage walls ; but the thread of continuity being broken, this
solitary straggler is not included in the Calendar of Odours.
" To Miss Caroline ToXtfrom her grateful friend^
"J. S. MILL."
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JOHN STUART MILL. 77
best in the two volumes." He is not very sanguine
about the early pcJrtion of it "I don't suppose many
people will read anything so scholastic, especially as I
do not profess to upset the schools, but to rebuild them,
and, unluckily, everybody who cares about such subjects
nowadays is of a different school from me. But that is
the concern of a higher power than mine ; my concern is
to bring out of me what is in me, although the world
should not find, even after many days, that what is cast
on the waters is wholesome bread ; nay, even although
(worst of all) it may happen to be, in reality, only
bread made of sawdust." Carlyle, indeed, says in his
Reminiscences that he found Mill's talk "rather wintry
and sawdustish ; " but Mill's real consciousness of what
he had done came out in his remark to Miss Fox,
" My family have no idea how great a man I am ! "
The System of Logic was published, after fruitless
negotiations with Murray, by Parker, in March 1843, '
and at once met with a great and well-deserved success. "^^^
Being almost entirely a scientific work, it could not rouse
the susceptibilities of those whom his recent criticism of
Bentham and his partial alienation from his father had
surprised and dismayed. It was in certain questions of
morals and political philosophy that the suspicion had
been raised that Mill was not a true Benthamite in every
detail of that somewhat unlovable character. No doubt
could be felt as to Mill's general position in logic,
psychology, and metaphysics. Nor could such a doubt
be for his contemporaries justified by the issue for Mill
is careful to avow his acceptance of the principles of the
English school — the school which, starting from Hobbes
and continued in illustrious descent by such thinkers
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as Locke and Hume and Hartley, held fast to experience
as their sheet-anchor, Locke's criticism of Innate Ideas
as their confession of faith, and Hartley and James
Mill's Associationism as their fighting orders. But
V where Mill surpassed all that had been done heretofore
was in the clear and patient analysis of the procedure
of science, especially the careful exposition of those
great methods of experimental inquiry which fills
the larger portion of his third book. In this Mill's
only rival was Whewell, and Whewell belonged to a
different camp. No wonder, then, that Mill's Logic
became the text-book of the Empirical school, and was
•quoted with respectful admiration by all the " Radical "
thinkers of the day. Grote, above all others, was
enthusiastic in its praise. Much as his general admira-
tion of the author might be, as he said, ** mixed with
fear," no man " conned and thumbed the book " as he
did. ** John Mill's Logic is the best book in my library,"
were, according to Dr. Bain, his emphatic words. Bain
himself published an appreciative article on it in the
Westminsier Review^ more laudatory than Mill liked.
When an adverse criticism appeared in the British Critic^
written by Mr. W. G. Ward, Mill was by no means
displeased. Mill knew that Mr. Ward was the ally of
Newman and Pusey, and that he should be considered
worthy of so extensive a review (the article was nearly
I GO pages) by thinkers who were diametrically opposed
to his tenets, gave him unbounded pleasure. " I always
hailed Puseyism," he cried, "and predicted that
Thought would sympathise with Thought, though I did
not expect to find in my own case so striking an
example."
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JOHN STUART MILL. 79
If, however, we ask whether the S^istem of Lo^
is destined to live as a classic on the subject, we open
a question of wider issue. Clearly, it is a work which
no student of the subject can possibly forego ; it has
been extensively used as an instrument of education
both at the Universities and elsewhere, though at
Oxford, at all events, a reaction on the lines of German ^
thought has for some time been in progress. The work ^ -"^
is divided into six JDOoks, of which the first two, headed - .
respectively "Names and Propositions" and ** Reason-
ing," represent the formal aspect of Logic, and are mainly
-concerned with the process of Deduction. The main
contention is, that the syllogism is a petitio principii^ the
conclusion being contained in the premisses, and that
the real process of inference is from particular case
to adjacent particular case. The second book contains
MilFs attack on one of the strongholds of the h priori
school, the belief, namely, that necessary truth is distinct
in kind, and not only in degree, from contingent truth.
The battle is usually fought out over the case of geomet-
rical axioms, which Mill declares to be empirical
in their origin. It is the third book, however, which ^v
is the striking feature of Mill's Logic^ where, in twenty-
five chapters, he gives an exhaustive analysis of Induction
and the processes of Science. The possibility of
Induction rests on the Uniformity of Nature ; but this
itself is only an empirical generalisation, which merely /
differs from other and less trustworthy generalisations
in the enormous number of observations on which it
is based, and the width and* variety of its scope.
Laws of Nature are then explained, and we are intro-
duced to the methods of Experimental Inquiry by
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which they are attained It may be noticed in pas-
sing that we are here exchanging the narrower view of
Induction as a purely logical process for the wider aspect
of it as a process of scientific investigation. As a logical
process, Induction may be defined as the inverse of
Deduction, or as the mode in which we estabhsh a
general proposition: as a scientific process it becomes
the means by which we attain to Laws of Nature.
Consequently Mill holds that Logic should include
the procedure of Science, which other writers on the
subject had taken pains to exclude. The methods
of Experimental Inquiry are four in number; the
method of Agreement, the method of Difference, the
method of Residues, and the method of Concomitant
Variations — methods which suggest some points of
comparison with the Tabulae which Francis Bacon
had detailed in the second book of his Novum
Organum, though they form, of course, a considerable
improvement on the cruder methods of the earliest of
inductive logicians. Mill found considerable difficulty
in getting scientific examples of purely Inductive
methods, and gained much assistance in this respect
from Dr. Bain, who suggested many of Liebig's theories,
and (in a subsequent edition) M. Brown-S^quard's
theory of cadaveric rigidity. But it was not easy to
find so good an example as the famous research on Dew
adduced by Herschel. As a matter of fact, most of the
discoveries of Science are made by what Mill called
the Deductive method — a combination of induction
and deduction, or sometimes a hypothetico-deductive
method. For instance, when Professor Huxley desired
to show in his Lay Sermons that the Darwinian
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JOHN STUART MILL, 8i
hypothesis is a scientific one, he explained the method
which Darwin had pursued by reference to Mill's
chapter on the deductive method. Purely inductive
methods, as Mill had to allow, were rather of use in a
Logic of Proof than a Logic of Discovery. The fourth
book of Mill's Logic^ called " Operations subsidiary to
Deduction," is a genei:al receptacle for a number of
subjects which Mill did not know where to place,
and Dr. Bain* suggests that it contains the materials
for a Logic of Definition and Classification, The
fifth and sixth books require no particular analysis
for our purpose, one being concerned with a classi-
fication of Fallacies, and the other with the Logic
of Moral Sciences, in which Mill made considerable
use of Comte's speculations on Sociology.
If we regard the work as a whole, we are forced
to distinguish its scientific character from its meta-
physical groundwork. Probably no other work on
Logic can give the reader so clear an idea of what
Science is and what it is doing ; and its merits in this
respect have received emphatic testimony from scientists
themselves. On the other hand, it might be urged that
Logic somewhat unduly extends its boundaries when
it covers all that Mill makes it cover; and especially
that it ought to rest on sounder metaphysical foundations
than can be discovered in the work of Mill. If it be
true that these foundations include irreconcilable dogmas,
then the shiftiness of the groundwork must in time make
itself felt in every department of the superstructure.
We begin with the title. Mill describes his work
as "The Principles of Evidence and the Methods
* Bain : /. S, Mill, p. 6*!.
6
<
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82 UFE OF
of Scientific Investigation." Now, every writer has to
formulate his own definition of Logic, and Mill is not
slow to explain that he understands by Logic the Science
of Proof or Evidence. If that be so, we have his
position as contrasted with those who make Logic
consist in an exhibition of the Formal Laws of Thought ;
and also with those who, like Herschel and Whewell,
make Logic essentially the Science of Discovery. But
if we return to the title, we are not quite sure of the last
contrast. Mill very clearly enrols himself as a disciple
of Material Logic, rather than of Formal ; but if Logic
is merely the Science of Proof, how is it also concerned
(as the general title states) with Scientific Investigation ?
According to the stricter definition of Mill, Logic is the
organon of Science ; according to the looser title of his
book, it is a part of Science. Perhaps this is not an
important point in itself; but it becomes important
when we come to the third book, the book which deals
with the methods of Induction. Are these, we ask,
methods of Discovery or methods of Proof? At first
Mill seemed to treat them as methods of Discovery;
then, in answer to a criticism of Whewell, he treats them
as methods of Proof only, though the first of the
methods, that of agreement, could never establish its
title to this character.
It was, perhaps, an unjustifiable confidence which led
us to class Mill among the Material Logicians, and
not among the Formal, For if Logic be concerned
with the Matter of our Thought, and not with its
Form, it is not quite clear why in the earlier books
we should have, amongst other topics, a system of
Categories (i. 3), and an enquiry into the validity
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JOHN STUART MILL. 83
of the Major Premiss in a Syllogism (ii. 3). In this
matter, the explanation is mainly historical, and only
partially logical. We know that Mill was made, at
an early age, to study Greek Logic and the scholastic
writers on Aristotle. We know that at a subsequent
period he felt it to be his task to put fresh life into some
of the older logical forms, to pour the new wine of
Empiricism into the old bottles of Aristotelianism.
Hence his desire to substitute for the old ten Categories
some Categories of his own, which were neither parts of
the Logical judgment, nor due to a grammatical analysis
of the sentence, but actual divisions of Nameable things.
So, top, he wishes to replace the Syllogistic mode of
inference by a scientific mode, and he labours to prove
that the conclusion does not depend on the major
premiss (in which case it would be proved by it), but
is only proved in accordance with it, the major premiss
being a register, memorandum, or shorthand note of
experience up to a given date. The whole controversy
about the petitio principii involved in the Syllogism is a
curious instance of the confusion caused by mixing up
two different views of Logic, The Syllogism is an
important, or rather, an archetypal process of thought,
viewed in its formal aspect ; for Concept, Judgment, and
Syllogism represent the initial grades into which thought
can be analysed. If we are not concerned with this
point of view, if we are only going to regard thought as
the mere correspondence of our apprehension with fact,
then the Logic which is to be a Logic of Evidence
should not concern itself with the formal validity of the
Syllogism at all.
The peculiar weakness of Mill's theory of inference.
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viz., that it proceeds from particular instance to particular
instance without deducing from an universal proposition,
becomes manifest in his treatment of the question of the
Uniformity of Nature. For in our belief in the Uniformity
of Nature we have an universal truth, which does, as
a matter of fact, serve as major premiss in all our
reasoning about Nature's operations. Indeed, Induction
itself is dependent on the truth of this major premiss,
or principle. For how are we to argue that what has
held good in a set of instances already observed will also
hold good in another set of instances resembling the
former, except on the supposition that Nature is uniform ?
Mill himself admits that Induction depends on the
Uniformity of Nature, and yet is forced, by his general
theory of inference, to prove that Induction must somehow
prove the Uniformity of Nature. We need not follow
him through all the twists and windings of the attempted
justification of so strange a position ; it will be enough
to point out that the question practically reduces itself
to the following dilemma: — Either the possibility of
Induction rests upon the Uniformity of Nature, in which
case our process of inference is clearly from a general or
universal truth down to its particular exemplifications, or
else we can only argue from particular instance to par-
ticular instance ; and in that case oiu* belief in Nature's
uniformity is strictly limited to our experience ; it becomes
a merely empirical generah'sation, and as such is apparently
{Logic iii., xvi.) inferior in validity to " Laws of Nature."
It is not possible for Mill to escape this dilemma by the
device which recommends itself to his successors — ^to Mr.
Herbert Spencer, for instance, and to the philosophic
believers in Evolution. For with them the experience
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JOHN STUART MILL. 85
which is to prove these and similar truths is the
accumulated experience of the human race through all
the ages of its development, from which our own and
limited individual experience can take its start as an
assured and incontrovertible body of truths. But Mill's
" experience " is not like Mr. Herbert Spencer's ; it is not
" race-experience," but " individual-experience." He is,
therefore, always open to the charge of trying to get wide-
reaching truths out of the changing and fragmentary
experiences of our three-score years and ten. The
solution is paradoxically inadequate to the problem.
Mill's metaphysical system may be described as tran-
sitional, and we can now more precisely indicate the
principles between which he oscillates. He comes half-
way between Hume and Herbert Spencer in certain
doctrines, while in others he apparently tries to mediate
between the school of Descartes and the school of
Locke. To Hume all truth depended on individual
experiences ; to Herbert Spencer some truths are h priori
to the individual, but h posteriori to the race. In Mill's
case we have (to refer back to the example we have been
just considering) the desire to make Induction rest as a
process on some large principle which individual exper-
ience could never substantiate, while all the time his
professed belief is that, apart from individual experience,
there can be no origin for truth. So, too, with some of
the theories which are expounded at the end of the
second book of the Logic and the beginning of the third.
One of these is the nature of geometrical axioms as a
part of so-called necessary truth. Mill's desire is to
explode the h priori view which the Cartesian school
held of the origin of knowledge. There can not be for
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Mill, any more than for Locke, i priori or innate
principles. Consequently, geometrical axioms are said
to be experimental. But the elements with which they
deal are for Mill not experimental, but ideal They deal
with straight lines and perfect circles. Lines perfectly-
straight, and circles perfectly round are not found in
actual experience, but are ideal. Hence Mill takes up
the curious position that though experience alone proves
that two straight lines can not enclose a space, yet
experience can not seemingly present us with lines
perfectly straight. As, however, unless the lines are
perfectly straight, two of them might enclose a space,
we are only confused by this apparent attempt to
combine two opposite points of yiew, the idealistic and
the experimental. The same oscillation, the same desire
to combine antagonistic positions, meet us in Mill's
discussion of the relation between Cause and Effect.
The idealistic school — ^the school which descended from
Descartes — ^laid stress on the invariable and unconditional
character of the relation between Cause and Effect as a
proof that it was mental, dpriori^ and therefore not derived
from Experience. Mill, in accordance with his general
acceptance of the doctrines of Locke and Hume, thinks
that the relation of Cause and Effect is purely experi-
mental, depending on an observed series of experiences.
Yet he goes on to assert that this experimental relation
can and must be invariable and unconditional. But
how can experience give rise to an invariable and
unconditional relation? Even Mill himself despite his
definitions, can not admit such a possibility. For so
clearly is our notion of Cause and Effect derived from
our experience that we are, he thinks, forced to admit
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JOHN STUART MILL, 87
that in distant parts of the stellar regions, where our
experience has not penetrated, events may follow without
being caused What, then, becomes of the invariable
and unconditional sequence of Effect on Cause? We
might go on multiplying instances of the same oscillation
between different theories. It will perhaps, however, be
better to connect this peculiarity in Mill's logical position
with a view which seems to have taken even stronger
hold of him in later years. So receptive was he of other
men's views, so much did he — after his own experiences
in his mental crisis— dislike dogmatic and intolerant ^—-^
statements, that it was a favourite belief of his that the
truth lay somewhere between two opposite theories.
This comes out very strongly in his Liberty^ written
some years after his Logic. One of the reasons why all
opinions should be published in perfect freedom from
legal restraint is just this doctrine about Truth, as being
placed half-way between two opposites. Another reason
is connected with his Individualism. All progress, all
variety, depend on individual efforts. Just as thought
can not progress unless different individuals in different
spheres are allowed to bring their quota to the general
store, so, too, national welfare is held |by Mill in his
Political Economy to depend on the principle of laisser
faire^ untrammelled by positive legislation. And this
point, too, connects itself with his Logic, For individual
effort is naturally enough the source of all welfare, if
individual experience is actually the source of all our
knowledge. Thus Individualism involves Liberty of
Dissent, and Liberty of Dissent is justified by the
assumption that Truth, in the majority of cases, forms a
sort of boundary line between opposing factions.
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Whether such a doctrine is to be accepted or not, it is
obvious enough that it acts disastrously on the clearness
and consistency of philosophical doctrines. Receptivity
of mind is valuable only so far as in exposition it is
balanced by certain fixed and unalterable points of view.
But if the expounder of a system of Logic is at the same
time alwajrs absorbing theories, even from his enemies,
we may admire his character, but we cannot always
understand his position. Let us take one final instance
from the sixth book of the Logic. In writing on
Sociology Mill is very much under the influence of
Auguste Comte and Positivism. He takes from him his
general conception of the Science, and, to a large extent,
his views on its method. But in Comte Sociology was
deduced directly from Biology: from the physical
organism we are to advance to the social organism. A
consequence is that Psychology as an introspective
science is by Comte discarded, and Cerebral Physiology
is put in its place. This Mill will by no means admit.
He belongs to a school of English psychologists, and he
cannot set his seal to the incompetence of his teachers.
Psychology, in consequence, must be made the founda-
tion of Sociology. The discovery is then made that
there is yet a link missing. We cannot at once advance
from the laws of mind to the laws which govern society.
We must introduce a science which shall deal with the
laws of character, the science which Mill terms
Ethology. Without Ethology he maintains Sociology to
be impossible. But can there be a science of Character ?
Mill, at all events, has to give it up. For some time
after the Logic came out he was busy with an attempt
to sketch such a science. But he had to confess his
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JOHN STUART MILL. 89
failure, and his failure with Ethology fatally interfered
with the larger project, which he entertained, of
executing a work on Sociology. That he despaired of
making anything out of Ethology is proved, acccording
to Dr. Bain, by his betaking himself to the composition
of his Political Economy. *
* Bain : /. S. Mill, p. 79.
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CHAPTER V.
RICARDO'S DISCIPLE — (1843-1849).
THE publication of the Logic brought no relaxation
of activity to Mill. We are now in the period of
his life which marks the highest tide, not, indeed,
of his industry, which was always continuous and exces-
sive, but of that literary achievement by which a man
secures his place in the history of his country. One
great claim to remembrance he had already put forth in
1843 : he was now preparing his second great contribu-
tion to the best thought of the age — ^the Political
Economy^ which was published in 1848. The intervening
years were not wholly occupied with this project
In 1842 he wrote a masterly review of Bailey's Theory
of Vision in the Westminster Review^ which con-
tained a vindication of Berkeley's metaphysical essay
on Sight as against the strictures of his critic In
the same year he seems to have had a slight attack
of illness, perhaps in consequence of his severe loss
in the American Repudiation, and was unable to take
his usual walk home from the India House to Ken-
sington Square; but on October 3rd he writes, "I
am quite well and strong, and now walk the whole
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JOHN STUART MILL. 91
way to and from Kensington without the self-indul-
gence of omnibi" In 1843, besides the publication
of his Logicy he wrote an article on " Michelet " for the
Edinburgh Review^ which he forecasts " will make some
of its readers stare." It contained a defence of the
papacy and the celibacy of the clergy, argued on philo-
sophical grounds, as a means of preserving the world from
barbarism ; but it does not seem to have produced the
consequences which Mill anticipated. The article came
out in 1844, and was followed by "The Claims of Labour"
and " Guizot," both contribute'd to the Edinburgh Re-
view in the succeeding year. Then, in 1846, there was
a labour of love in the review of the first two volumes of
Grote's Greek History in the same periodical ; while, in
1847, he wrote articles on Irish affairs in the Chronicle.
It is one evidence of the thoroughness with which this
occasional writing was performed, that he read through
the whole of the Eiad and Odyssey in the original before
his article on Grote's History. It illustrates, also, Mill's
dislike of the idea of any generic difference between
men and women that he prevailed upon Grote to alter, in
a second edition, the words "masculine" and "feminine,"
which the historian had applied to the difference
between the scientific and artistic activity of the
Greeks.* His articles in the Morning Chronicle were
principally devoted to an urgent recommendation to
reclaim the waste lands in Ireland, and convert them
into peasant proprietorships — ^a topic appearing again
in the Political Economy^ which was, perhaps, sug-
gested to his mind by his friend, Mr. Thornton.
Perhaps, however, the most important incident in these
♦ Bain : /. S. Mill, p. 86.
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92 UFE OF
years was his friendship and correspondence with the
French Positivist philosopher, Auguste Comte. " Have
you ever looked into Comte's Cours de PMlosophie Bosi-
tivef" he writes to Dr. Bain on October 15, 1841. "He
makes some mistakes, but, on the whole, I think it very
near the grandest work of this age." His correspondence
with Comte began in 1841 and lasted to 1846. The
greatest warmth of feeling between the two is shown in
the letters of 1842 and 1843. After that it somewhat
cools, though as late as 1846, when Comte had lost his
Clotilde, he received an affectionate letter of condolence
from Mill. But it was impossible for a man of the high
and generous feeling which Mill so uniformly displayed
to be on intimate terms with one who was so utterly
different to himself both in tone of character and habitual
range of thoughts. Comte, more perhaps than any
other philosopher, except Francis Bacon, demands from
his critics a clear severance between the character of his
life and the character of his intellect. One of the most
comprehensive and synthetic thinkers of his age was, in
domestic affairs, perhaps one of the meanest and smallest
When he was turned out from the position of Examiner
at the Polytechnic School at Paris, he did not scruple
to demand subsidies from his friends, nor to revile them
if they refused to contribute. Mill, who, despite his
losses through the American Repudiation, had been
forward in offers of pecuniary help, first found a topic of
disagreement in the position of women ; and then had
finally to convey to Comte that Grote and Molesworth,
whom he had interested in the case of the disappointed
Examiner, were disinclined to give any further assistance.
Comte, who in his correspondence shows much of the
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JOHN STUART MILL, 93
airs of a X\\<txzrj parvenu of course, could not understand
such a refusal, and wrote to Mill a long lecture on the
relations between rich men and philosophers. Grote
was, however, obdurate, haying conceived a strong dis-
like to Comte's sociological theories; indeed, it became
almost impossible for Mill to continue the correspondence
with a writer so wanting in ordinary taste. A final letter
was written on the occasion of the death of Comte's
Clotilde. Perhaps Mill was glad to be able to finish the
correspondence with a subject in which there was no
opportunity for controversy or angry retort.
The Principles of Political Economy was published, as
we have already seen, in the beginning of 1848. Many
circumstances made its publication a notable event
amidst the higher circles of the literary world. Mill had
been known to be a student of the subject since his
earlier years. In boyish walks with his father eco-
nomic topics had been discussed, and it was principally
owing to these conversations that James Mill's Elements
of Political Economy was produced. Moreover, the
friendship between the elder Mill and Ricardo was
notorious, as was also the fact that, had it not been for
his friend's solicitations, Ricardo's theories would never
have seen the light of day. John Mill himself had made
some preliminary contributions to the subject, which he
had written as early as 1830 and 1831, but which had
only been published in 1844, under the title of Essays
on Unsettled Questions in Political Economy. The first
of these dealt with the laws of interchange between
nations, and was sufficient to prove how close a study he
had made of Ricardo's theory of foreign exchanges.
The second and third dealt respectively with the
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influence of consumption on production, and the mean-
ing of the words "productive" and "unproductive,"
as applied to labour, consumption, and expenditure.
The fourth showed still more decisively the influence of
Ricardo, as it was concerned with the justification of
the theorem, that "profits depend on wages, rising as
wages fall, and falling as wages rise." The fifth essay
was on the method of political economy, a subject
treated also in the subsequent work, which forms a
point of some importance in the estimation of Mill's
position. There was, besides these definite contri-
butions on Mill's part to the literature of the subject,
a general expectation that the diflerences and dis-
crepancies between political economists would shortly
disappear, and that Mill's exposition would be the great
instrument in settling the essential principles. Colonel
Torrens declared that in twenty years there would not
exist a doubt respecting any of its more fundamental
principles. Professor Sidgwick points out the reason for
this confidence. "The prosperity," he says, "that
followed on the abolition of the corn-laws gave practical
men a most impressive and satisfying proof of the
soundness of the abstract reasoning by which the
expediency of firee trade had been inferred." It was, in
consequence, generally believed that 'the state of
polemical discussion' was passed, and that a really
constructive era had dawned.
We, who live with forty years' additional experience of
the changing fortunes of political economy, know how
little these sanguine expectations were destined to be
realised. Much has been changed in the interval ; to
some extent we have gone back to older views ; in some
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JOHN STUART MILL. 95
respects we are still looking for that wider synthesis
which is to make the unsettled questions fall into then:
proper place. But the value of Mill's work can only be
understood in reference to what came before him as well as
to the speculations which succeeded him, and it becomes
necessary, however briefly, to trace the development of
economical thought in England. For our purposes, we
need go no further back than that mercantile system
which forms the first phase of the modem thought on
the subject. The general position of the mercantilists
can be sketched somewhat as follows. They thought
that money and wealth were identical, and that a country,
therefore, was bound to attract to itself the greatest share
of the precious metals. Each country, they argued,
must export as much as it can, and import as little as it
can, receiving the difference of the two values in gold
and silver — a difference which was called " the balance of
trade." In order to secure such a balance. Governments
must either prohibit, or put high duties on, the importa-
tion of foreign wares \ they must resort also to bounties
on the export of home manufactures, and restrictions on .
the export of the precious metals, in pursuit of the same
object It is not difficult to understand where the
mistakes of such a theory lay. It is obvious that the
mercantilists overestimated the importance of possessing
a large amount of the precious metals; and the newer
ideas, which were promulgated by Petty and North,
about 1 69 1, were concerned with showing that national
wealth depended rather on the gifts of nature and the
labour of man. Further, it is clear that foreign trade
should not be so unduly estimated in relation to
domestic, nor should the industry which works up
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materials be considered so superior to that which
produces them. "The balance of trade" is a fiction,
the real aim for the economist being the attempt to
secure for the whole population the necessaries and
conveniences of life. Finally, such devices as prohibi-
tions, protective duties, bounties, and monopolies, ought
to be discarded as being in reality impediments to trade,
which only requires as its indispensable condition the
freedom of industry.
The second phase of modem economic thought
may, perhaps, be said to begin with the " physiocrats "
(Quesnay, Gournay, and Dupont de Nemours), who,
amongst many errors, brought into prominence principles
which were destined to play a considerable part in sub-
sequent speculations. The physiocratic theory begins
with the idea of a Jus Naturce^ a simple, impressive,
and beneficial code established by Nature herself. From
this conception flowed such principles as the belief that
all individuals have the same natural rights, and that
Government is a necessary evil. In relation to trade,
then, the ideal motto of Governments should be laissez-
faire, laissez-passer^ — ^the highest point of negative
indifference, in order that labour might be completely
unfettered and undisturbed. Immensely more valuable
as is the work of Adam Smith, it yet proceeds on
much the same lines. It is true that the conception
of a code of Nature is put into the background, but
the belief in the individual, with his desire for gain
and the necessity for his freedom, is the animating spirit
of the Wealth of Nations. Where Adam Smith is
honourably distinguished from his predecessors, and
even from some of his successors, lies in his copious
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JOHN STUART MILL. 97
illustrations of tenets by actual experience, and his
continuous references to historical data in support of
his theories. Yet, what the German critics, Roscher
and Hildebrand, derisively call " Smithianismus " has
defects which have recently become patent to modern
eyes. If Smith's conception of the social economy is
essentially individualistic, it must further be added that
the " economic man," on whom the whole system turns,
is a hypothetical being from whom all motives, other
than the selfish and the interested, have been carefully
abstracted. It results that the economic advantage of
society must be held to be identical with the economic
advantage of the individual, and that the system of
Smith becomes too absolute in character because its
regard is exclusively directed to man as an abstract
being rather than to man as he has been made by
the discipline of history and the courses of civilisa-
tion. But whatever be the merits or demerits of
Adam Smith, it is certain that the whole tendency
of his successor, Ricardo, is to exaggerate the charac-
teristic points, and to leave out that saving refer-
ence to actual experience which formed the strong
point of his predecessor. Ricardo, at all events, moves
in a world of abstractions; the "economic man,"
actuated by a single principle of greed, stalks everywhere
through his pages; nor has custom, apparendy, any
chance against competition in industry ; nor is combina-
tion regarded as a possible expedient in solving the
problems of labour. The famous doctrine of Rent is
only hypothetically true in the most advanced industrial
communities, however much the implied theory that the
interests of landlords are permanently in opposition to
7
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those of other classes may have suited the democratic
character of current Benthamism. Comte, indeed,
remarks in one of his letters to Mill/ that Benthamism
was a derivative from political economy and from the
system of natural liberty, and the truth of the remark is
seen in the attitude of men like McCulloch, James Mill,
and others, to the Ricardian principles. Further weak
points in Ricardo himself were his habitual assumptions
that capital could be so easily transferred from one
undertaking to another, that labour could also be so
easily transferred from one industry to another,! and
that both capitalists and labourers might be expected to
know all about the prospects of industry, not only in
their own, but in other countries. To these must be
added, as still further demerits, Ricardo's extreme loose-
ness of phraseology, t and the want of any explanation of
the appropriate method by which political economy
should be studied.
We have called Mill Ricardo's disciple, but it must not
be supposed that he was in any sense a servile follower
of his master. He clearly held it his mission to justify
Ricardo to the world, and he speaks of Ricardo's
"superior lights" in comparison with his predecessors.
But his design was much larger than a mere illustration
of Ricardian principles. The object of his book, as he
* Lettres (TA. Comte A/. S. MUl^ p. 4.
t Adam Smith knew better. ** It appears, evidently from exper-
ience, that man is, of all sorts of luggage, the most difficult to be
transported." — WedUh of Nations^ Book I., c. viiL
X Senior called him *' the most incorrect writer who ever attained
philosophical eminence.'* Quoted by Ingram. — History of Political
Economy^ p. 123.
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JOHN STUART MILL. 99
himself tells us, was to exhibit economic phenomena in
relation to the most advanced conceptions of his own
time on the general philosophy of society — to do, in fact,
for the nineteenth century what Adam Smith had done
for the eighteenth. In pursuance of this aim there were
many points in his treatise which were not only valuable
in themselves, but exhibited a distinct advance on any-
thing which had gone before them. He himself used to
say that Ricardo had supplied the backbone of the
science, but, as Cairnes remarked in a notice of Mill's
labours in the Examiner^ it is not less certain that the
limbs, the joints, and the muscular developments were
the work of Mill. We may take, for example, the
development which Mill gives of Ricardo's doctrine of
foreign trade, where the skeleton is clothed with flesh,
and principles of the most abstract kind are translated
into concrete language, and brought to explain familiar
facts. Or we may look at Mill's doctrine of the
economic nature of land, which, though it has been
sometimes denied, is clearly, in its views of the peculiar
nature of landed property and its doctrines of "the
unearned increment," a direct deduction from Ricardo's
theory of Rent. More originality is shown by Mill in
the introduction of new premisses, which very often
largely alter the deductions to be drawn from old prin-
ciples. For instance, in reference to the effect which the
growth of society has on the minimum point of wages,
Mill remarks that this minimum is not a physical but a
»2<7r«/ minimum, and is, therefore, capable of being altered
with the changes of character in the population at large.
Hence, instead of a weary pessimism as to the future
condition of the labourer, we have the suggested chance
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of improvement as his moral character improves ; and
the chapter, " the Future of the Industrial Classes," is
very different in tone and speculation from anything we
find in Ricardo. So, too, Mill sees readily enough how
much the influence of custom serves to modify the stress
of competition, and how clearly the real regulator of rent
over the greater part of the habitable globe is not
competition only, but competition, custom, and the
absolute will of the owner of the soil " This recogni-
tion," says Cairnes, "threw an entirely new light over
the whole problem of land-tenure, and plainly furnished
grounds for legislative interference in the contracts
between landlords and tenants. Its application to
Ireland was obvious, and Mill himself did not hesi-
tate to urge the application with all the energy and
enthusiasm which he invariably threw into every causQ
that he espoused," On another point Mill also departed
from Ricardo. In deference to the arguments of
his friend, Mr. Thornton, he finally gave up the
'* wage-fund" theory, and though here Cairnes thinks him
wrong, there are many modern economists who. believe
that his newer position was entirely in the right. Both
Mill and Cairnes, however, are agreed in one important
modification of previous doctrine. By both of these
writers it is maintained that economic art, or the applica-
tion of principles to practice, does not follow straight
from economic science. Application to practice
demands other considerations than those purely
economical — a point the importance of which will
come out in the sequel.
In the discussion of Mill's Logic in the last chapter,
it was suggested that Mill represented a transitional
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JOHN STUART MILL. loi
state of opinion, between Hume and Herbert Spencer
on the one hand, and the school of empiricism and
idealism on the other. In this position was found
the explanation of many of the inconsistencies Which
analysis seemed to reveal in the fundamental dogmas
of the work. Up to 1843, in point of fact, the tide
in Mill's mind seemed to be strongly setting in the
direction of a reform of Benthamism by means of
Coleridge, Carlyle, and the Germans, owing especially to
the influence of John Sterling. Somewhere about that
period it received a check ; and the check was due to
Comte, the Socialists, and, perhaps in a lesser degree,
Mrs. Taylor. We have now to ask the same question
with regard to the Political Economy, The system
which Mill inherited, and in which he was trained,
was clearly the doctrine of Ricardo and Malthus. Were
there any fresh influences acting on him, and if so, was
their character consistent with the earlier views ?
One of the earliest critics of the system of Ricardo
was a professor at Haileybury, Richard Jones, who lived
between the years 1790-1855, and whose Essay on the
Distribution of Wealthy and on the Sources of Taxation^
was published in 1831, seventeen years before the work
of Mill. Jones was dissatisfied at once with the method
and the results of Ricardo's theories. **It" he said,
"we wish to make ourselves acquainted with the
economy and arrangements by which the different
nations of the earth produce and distribute their
revenues, I really know but of one way to attain our
object, and that is, to look and see. We must get
comprehensive views of facts, that we may arrive at
principles that are truly comprehensive. If we take a
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different method, if we snatch at general principles, and
content ourselves with confined observations, two things
will happen to us. First, what we call general principles
will often be found to have no generality — we shall set
out with declaring propositions to be universally true,
which at every step of our further progress we shall be
obliged to confess are frequently false; and, secondly,
we shall miss a great mass of useful knowledge which
those who advance to principles by a comprehensive
examination of facts necessarily meet with on their
road."* It is clear that we here meet with some-
thing like a revolt against the ^ priori^ deductive
method of Ricarda Nor was Jones inclined to admit
some of Ricardo's conclusions. He animadverts on
the theory of Rent, and declares that besides competi-
tion, which, under the supposed conditions, might
affect "farmers' rents," there was also custom, which
indubitably affected "peasant-rents." Here was much
the same modificatfon which Mill afterwards brought
forward. He further made a classification of peasant-
rents into serf, metayer, ryot, and cottier, and the
classification reappears in substance in the pages of
Mill. In other points of his criticism — such, as the
denial that the interests of landlords are necessarily
opposed to those of other classes, and that wages can
rise only at the expense of profits — Mill was not at one
with him ; but it is perhaps true, as Mr. Ingram
remarks, that Mill, while using Jones' work, gave his
merits but faint recognition.
The Philosophie Positive of Comte — at least the two
first volumes — was brought over to England in 1837
* Quoted by Ingram in his History of Political Economy ^ p. 143.
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JOHN STUART MILL, 103
by Wheatstone, who always claimed the merit of its
introduction. Mill read them about the end of 1837, or
beginning of 1838, and was profoundly struck with them.
The effect was seen in the sixth book of his Logic^ as has
been already remarked. Now, while Gomte thought but
meanly of Political Economy as it was pursued in Eng-
land, he sketched out a great science of Social Physics,
which he believed was destined to include speculations
on economical subjects in a larger framework. With his
criticisms of English political economy. Mill, of course,
could not agree, and stigmatised them as essentially
shallow and superficial. But the new science of Sociology
made such an impression on him that for some time he
busied himself with the attempt to write a large book on
the same subject. In reality; however, Comte's scheme
involved principles which were fundamentally different
from his own. Comte believed that Sociology was
one science which should be studied in its totality,
because all social phenomena had- a certain solidarity
— an idea which made a separate economic science an
impossibility. Its method, moreover, was not to be
deductive, but to be based on a systematic historical
comparison, while the historical spirit was conspicuously
absent fe the doctrinaires of the eighteenth century.
Inasmuch as it was to be studied historically, the science
demanded a division between a statical theory of society
(the influences acting on a given state at any one time),
and a dynamical theory (the steps by which a historical
state was evolved out of preceding states). This dis-
tinction was eagerly seized on by Mill, though perhaps
he never saw how it reacted on his older views of an
abstract treatment of economics, and how it necessitated
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104 UFE OF
the substitution for them of a doctrine of the laws
of the economic development of nations. He does,
indeed, attempt in Book IV. of his work, a treatment of
Economic Dynamics, but his critics do not appear to
regard this portion as one of the most successful
There were other influences also in the air, besides
the influence of the PMlosopkU Positive. Chief among
these was the theory of the Socialists, the work of men
like St Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, and Lassalle. Two
ideas at least were here prominent : on the one hand,
the destruction of the negative theory of Government ;
on the other, the limitation of the individualistic
greed for wealth and dislike of labour. There was,
besides, the German school of economists, men like
Wilhelm Roscher, whose work appeared in 1843, and
Bruno Hildebrand, whose first volume appeared in
1848. In them a prominent view was the necessity
of accentuating the moral elements in economic study,
and putting the selfish into the background. Even in
England the spirit of change was abroad in the writ-
ings of Carlyle, with his professed antagonism to the
tenets of the Manchester school
If we look at Mill as being in the midst of, if not
affected by, such influences as these, we shall understand
the reason for some of those doubts which are suggested
to some minds by his work. The way in which he turns
to Political Economy is in itself significant It will
be remembered that, after the publication of his Logic^
his thoughts were for some time occupied with Sociology,
and that he abandoned the subject because, in the way
in which he interpreted the science, it was necessarily
dependent on Ethology, and of Ethology he failed to
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JOHN STUART MILL. 105
make any real scheme. It was then that he betook
himself to Political Economy. The consequence was
that the relation in which his newer subject stood
to Sociology was never perspicuously explained. Was
Political Economy a part of the larger science, or was
it only a sort of preparatory study ? If we look at the
title of his larger work, Principles of Political Economy^
with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy^
the doubt is suggested whether Political Economy
is in reality such an integral portion of Sociology that
its separate study cannot be otherwise than abstract and
hypothetical. But elsewhere he speaks of it as " carved
out of the general body of the science of society," a
sentence which clearly affirms its necessary subordination.
The reason of such hesitation, if it be hesitation, is,
probably, that he had his own version of what the
science of society meant, and that his version did not
in every respect correspond to that of Comte, from
whom, nevertheless, he derived it. To Comte, Social
Physics were to be studied historically. This was one
consequence of the distinction he drew between Social
Statics and Social Dynamics. This, too, was the result
of his general assumption that as we rise in the series
of sciences from simplicity to complexity of data, the
general inductive methods are to be aided by special
devices. Thus Biology demands the use of the com-
parative method, and Social Physics, in its turn, because
of the increased complexity of its data, demands the
use of the historical method. But to Mill, Sociology
was dependent on Ethology, the science of human
character, and it in its turn was dependent on
Psychology, the science of the general laws of mind.
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Sociology was, therefore, to be studied deductively in
great measure, because of this intimate dependence on
the sciences of mind. It is true that it must also be
studied by the inverse deductive method (which is
Mill's name for the historical method), and so far as this
reservation went, it became a science apart But
Political Economy, at all events, might, whatever its rela-
tions to Sociology, be studied deductively, as dependent
on the laws of human nature; and thus Mill could
still keep himself in alliance with the views of Ricardo.
In the fifth of his Essays an Unsettled Questions
he declares with some dogmatism that the d priori
method is the only one which is applicable, and
that the it posteriori method "is altogether inefficacious
in those sciences (the social) as a means of arriving
at any considerable body of valuable truth." But
then came in the later work the reminiscence of
Comte's distinction between the Statics and Dynamics
of Society, which he in many parts of his book values
so highly. He therefore tries to save himself by
a distinction between two sorts of economic inquiry,
only one of which could be treated by the h
posteriori method. The chief merit of his treatise, he
says, lies in its distinction between the theory of Pro-
duction and the theory of Distribution. Production is
based on unalterable natural laws, which could therefore
only be studied h priori \ while the principles of Dis-
tribution, which are modified by successive changes in
society, could only be gathered h posteriori. Yet even
here he is not consistent For in the treatment of
Production, as Mr. Sidgwick has pointed out, he proceeds
by analysing our common empirical knowledge of the
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JOHN STUART MILL. 107
facts of industry, and this, if it is not formally induction,
is clearly a sort of induction. The pressure of the old
Ricardian theory on his mind is thus struggling with the
newer lights derived from Comte.
Other ambiguities are not difficult of detection, especially
in relation to Malthusian views and the theories of the
Socialists. It is not easy to be sure of MilFs attitude
towards Malthus. On the whole he seems to accept his
doctrine, and to incorporate it with the deductions from
Ricardo's theory of rent. He adds, indeed, an idea which
is not found in Malthus. "Malthus himself and some of
his followers, such as Thomas Chalmers, regarded late
marriages as the proper means of restricting numbers ;
an extension to the lower classes of the same prudence
that maintains the position of the upper and middle
classes. Mill prescribes a further pitch of self-denial,
the continence of married couples. At least such is the
more obvious interpretation to be put upon his language.
It was the opinion of many, that while his estimate of
pure sentimental affection was more than enough, his
estimate of the sexual passion was too low."* It is clear,
at all events, that he believed in the necessity of
restricting the population. Yet it might perhaps be
maintained that such moral restraints are dependent
for their working on the individual responsibility for
the support of a family ;. and this idea might be difficult
to preserve in the Socialistic theories to which in
many parts of his work he gives such weight For,
especially in the third edition of his Political Economy
(after the French Revolution of 1848), he tells us that,
though still believing in individual liberty of action, he
♦ Bain : /. S. Mill, p. 89.
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turned his thoughts to "a common ownership in the
raw material of the globe, and an equal participation in
all the benefits of combined labour." Tempted thus by
Socialist schemes, he yet will not give himself up to
them. To improve the existing distribution of wealth
he looks hopefully in the direction of the Socialistic
writers ; but though thus expecting the dawn of a newer
order, he will in the meantime be content with the old
views of private interest*
" His was not a historical head," says Roscher
of Mill, and thus, though he surveys "the promised
land," he yet will die on some Ricardian Pisgah.
Promised land, indeed, the newer political economy
may never furnish. But amongst the wildernesses
in which the students of the science still seem to
be wandering, there is one beacon. The idea,
which is of indubitable value in the German
historical school, is the necessity of accentuating the
moral element in economic study. We have seen that
both Mill and Cairnes desire to keep separate economic
science and economic art, possibly owing to the con-
viction that if the principles of economic science, with its
assumptions of individual greed and selfishness, were
immediately applied to practice, the results would be, if
not immoral, at least non-moral. But if we ask,
how the step can be taken from theory to practice,
in what way the abstract laws can be translated into
concrete facts, the answer in economy, as well as in other
departments, can only be furnished by morals. Morals,
in fact, form the stepping-stone between principle and
* Cf. **The Chapters on Socialism " contributed (posthumously)
to the Fortnightly Review in 1879.
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JOHN STUART MILL. 109
act, and thus the necessity which the German eco-
nomists feel is amply justified. For surely the uses
of wealth are at least as important as the modes
in which it can be acquired, and have an enor-
mous effect on the moral condition of a people.
Whatever else may or may not be required from the
economics of the future — whether the tendency may be
to emphasise the functions of government, or whether
the pendulum may swing back again, as Mr. Herbert
Spencer desires, to the doctrine of laisser-faire — no
theory can be held to meet the problems of our age,
unless it aids in the formation, both in the higher and
lower regions of the industrial world, of profound con-
victions as to social duties. The theory of individual
rights has had its day : that of duty must take its place.*
* Cf. an interesting chapter on the Future in Mr. Ingram's
History of Political Economy^ from which much has been taken in
the views indicated above. Roscher's works referred to are —
Crundriss zu Vorlesungen iiher die Staatswirthschaft nach gesch-
ichtlicher Metliode, and Zur Geschichte der Englischen Volkswirth-
schaftslehre, Cf., too, Jevons's Future of Political Economy, —
Fortnightly Review, 1876.
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CHAPTER VI.
MRS. TAYLOR — (1848-1858).
FROM the two great literary labours of Mill, the
Logic and the Political Economy^ we turn to some
of the incidents of his domestic life. There is
possibly a comparative failure of energy after 1848, due
to the enormous strain of the two winters' work in
1842-3 and 1846-7. One instance is quoted by Dr.
Bain. After the appearance of Ferrier's Institutes — a
metaphysical work on the lines of what is known as
subjective Idealism — Mill said that he could have
dashed off an article much as he did on the publication
of Baile/s Theory of Vision. But no article was
forthcoming, and his papers in the Westminster Review
seem not to have been so frequent as of yore. One
cause of this was undoubtedly ill-health. In the summer
of 1848 he had a bad fall in Kensington Gardens, which
was followed by an affection of the eyes. " Lame and
unable to use his eyes," says Dr. Bain, "I never saw him
in such a state of despair." Six years later he liad the
illness to which he makes allusion in the Autobiography.
An attack on the chest, ending in the partial destruction
of one lung, he did his best to cure by an eight months
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JOHN STUART MILL. 1 1 1
absence from England, during which he visited Italy,
Sicily, and Greece. According to Sir James Clark, the
local disease was not so serious as the general debility,
which, in the opinion of his medical adviser, would
probably prevent him from doing any other considerable
work. Peacock, who was the head of his office in the
India House, told Grote that his absence was much felt,
and it was no doubt a considerable relief, not only to his
friends, but to his official chief, when he returned to
London with his health tolerably re-established. The
literary work of this period does not seem to have been
great. He published in the Westminster Review^ in 1849,
a vindication of the French Revolution of the preceding
year, in answer to the strictures of his father's friend,
Lord Brougham. This was followed three years later by
an article on Whewell's Elements of Morality^ equalling in
the savageness of its attack his previous diatribe against
Professor Sedgwick. Then came a final paper on Grote's
History of Greece^ which he published in the Edinburgh
Review, His official duties became heavy when, in
1857, the East India Company was threatened with
extinction. He had become head of the office, owing to
the retirement of Peacock in 1856, and it fell to his lot
to draft a petition to Parliament on behalf of his
employers. This petition was pronounced by Earl Grey
to be the ablest State-paper he had ever read. Despite
his earnest protest, however, the Bill passed for the
transfer of the Indian Government to the Crown, and
Mill retired from official work. He was applied to by
Lord Stanley to serve on the new Indian Council, but he
declined the offer on the plea of failing health.
The whole of this period is, so far as Mill's domestic
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112 LIFE OF
life is concerned, overshadowed by Mrs. Taylor. Intro-
duced to her as early as 1 831, at a dinner party at Mr.
Taylor's house, where were present Roebuck, W. J. Fox,
and Harriet Martineau, the acquaintance rapidly ripened
into intimacy, and the intimacy into a friendship, which
Mill himself was never weary of describing in terms that
could not but appear extravagant to others. In some of the
presentation copies of his Political Economy he wrote the
following dedication : — " To Mrs. John Taylor, who of all
persons known to the author is the most highly qualified
either to originate or to appreciate speculation on social
advancement, this work is, with the highest respect and
esteem, dedicated." An article on "the Enfranchise-
ment of Women " was made the occasion for another
panegyric. The dedication of Mill's work on Liberty
is well known.* Finally, the pages of the Autobiography
ring with the dithyrambic praise of "his almost
infallible counsellor." There is a touch of fatuousness
in all this, which can be accounted for only on the
* ** To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the
inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings —
the friend and wife, whose exalted sense of truth and right was my
strongest incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward —
I dedicate this volume. Like all that I have written for many
years, it belongs as much to her as to me ; but the work as it
stands has had, in a very insufEcient degree, the inestimable
advantage of her revision ; some of the. most important portions
having been reserved for a more careful re-examination, which they
are now never destined to receive. Were I but capable of inter-
preting to the world one half the great thoughts and noble
feelings which are buried in her grave, I should be the medium of
a greater benefit to it, than is ever likely to arise from anything that
I can write, unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivalled
wisdom."
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